| Abstract | FishNet2 (www.fishnet2.net) is a global network of fish collection databases that gives researchers access to data on roughly 4 million fish species lots, representing over 30 million specimens. Before this project began, only about two-thirds of the records in Fishnet2 were georeferenced. The goals of this collaborative project were to georeference all localities without geographic coordinates and repatriate the results to data providers. The Collaborative Georeferencing Client (CoGe)of the GEOLocate Platform was used to georeference and verify the roughly 250,000 localities in FishNet2 lacking coordinates at the start of the project. Each of the twelve collaborating institutions hired a full-time georeferencing technician to verify and correct the CoGe generated geographic coordinates for localities assigned to his or her institution. Since January 2013, when the georeferencing phase of the project began, more than 244,000 localities of have been processed (214,000 corrected), and over 1 million specimens records have been processed (935,000 corrected). Records that could not be georeferenced were skipped and reasons for not correcting the coordinates were recorded. Every corrected record includes geographic coordinates in decimal degrees, an uncertainty radius, and most of the records have a user generated error polygon to define the uncertainty in the determinations. |
