14 and 15 June
Presenter: Arthur D. Chapman (an International Expert on
Scientific Coordinator of Biodiversity Information from Queensland
Australia)
The ability to electronically exchange biodiversity data
is leading to improved opportunities for better environmental decision making,
conservation, policy and management.
However, much of the data being integrated is of varying quality and is
thus of questionable value to many end users.
With biodiversity data, the quality is often dependent on two key
sources of error – the taxonomic names and the locality information, including
the georeferencing. This course examines the problems that are most commonly
encountered and discusses ways of identifying them and correcting them in
collections databases, as well as ways of digitizing information in order to
reduce resultant error.
Many tools have been developed in recent years to aid in
the identification of errors in species names and these are now being
incorporated as on-line data validation tools that can be used in batch format
to identify errors and to provide feedback to data custodians of possible
errors in their data.
This was a highly successful workshop organised by the South African National Biodiversity Institute and hosted here at the Biodiversity and Conservation Biology Department. I will be implementing some of the web-based tools in my upcoming course in Resource Mapping.
No comments:
Post a Comment