[Taxacom] Digitizing Science Collections

[John Grehan]

Going out an personally recording the distribution is not always feasible.
Hence using label data from specimens is sometimes the only practical
option. In a current revision of a ghost moth genus in Latin America I do
not have the $ to collect specimens from the wild and so have to rely on
specimens collected by others.

John Grehan

On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 6:24 PM, Stephen Thorpe
<stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>wrote:

> label data is a huge can of worms for all sorts of reasons! After having
> thought the issue through at some length, I have come to the probably
> rather unpopular conclusion that it is a bad idea to think that the
> totality of label data for any given taxon is a useful thing to have! It is
> somewhat analogous to the example of using WoRMS as a source for that squat
> lobster article on WP ... given the way the WoRMS page was at the time, it
> was best to just not mention it at all! There is a certain irony that it is
> common nowadays for scientists to spend money going on collecting tours to
> get fresh material of taxa for use in DNA analysis. Actually, it would be
> better to go on a collecting tour to gather reliable distributional
> information for the taxon! Any distribution map based on the uncritical
> acceptance of label data is likely to be problematic, unles the map is so
> coarse that points cover a significant proportion of the planet! Even worse
> is displaying a
>  distribution map of a tiny subsample of available label data! If you want
> to know the geographical distribution of a taxon, you gotta go out and
> measure it ... carefully!
>
> Stephen
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: David Campbell <pleuronaia at gmail.com>
> To: TAXACOM at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> Sent: Wednesday, 16 May 2012 10:01 AM
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Digitizing Science Collections
>
> > Unfortunately, original data labels are often extremely misleading,
> > especially regarding distributional information. After georeferencing
> > over 200,000 insect specimens from multiple institutions, the figures
> > work out to over 20% of all original labels have significant
> > omissions or ambiguities (the latter category being primarily things
> > like abbreviations, uncertain reference points, uncertain date
> > formats, or handwriting problems), and some 5% of all original labels
> > have genuine errors of one sort or another (mostly typographical
> > errors). I doubt such problems are unique to insect labels.
>
> I can confirm that mollusk labels have similar issues with similarly
> high frequency, though I have not tallied percentages. In fact,
> insects may have better than average quality of average data because
> fewer specimens survive from the "I picked these up somewhere when my
> ship sailed around the world" era.  Having a misidentified specimen
> with good locality data is far more useful than a correctly identified
> specimen with bad locality data, as the identification can be fixed
> from the specimen.  Someone knowledgeable about the taxon or locality
> may be able to recognize that a record is supect, even without
> examining the specimen.  But all data in a database needs competent
> checking to be reliable.  And many larger collections will include
> items from various sources, of varying reliability for their
> localities and identifications.
>
> The problem is compounded when online databases grab information from
> varied sources without careful verification or good harmonization
> protocols.  In particular, homonyms can lead to perfectly good
> information from one database being presented wrongly in another one,
> which claims that corrections should be referred back to the first
> database.
>
> --
> Dr. David Campbell
> Collections Assistant
> The Paleontological Research Institution
> 1259 Trumansburg Road
> Ithaca NY 14850
>
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