Topic: Article on trust in public databases
This is worth a read:
Maldonado C, Molina CI, Zizka A, Persson C, Taylor CM, et al. 2015. Estimating species diversity and distribution in the era of Big Data: To what extent can we trust public databases? Glob. Ecol. Biogeogr. 24(8):973–84
(download from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 … 6/abstract
Though the analyses are South American, some of the observations are highly relevant, I picked up on
Ideally, careful quality evaluation of the primary information in a dataset downloaded from GBIF should be conducted, before the data is used for further analyses – in particular checking, where possible, the species identification and locality data, including their georeferences (coordinates for latitude and longitude)
and the comments about data validation and new GBIF initiatives to improve it (our Atlas data feeds into GBIF so the same comments apply).
For workers like me trying to pull georeferences out of published papers across Europe or museum workers trying to do the same from specimen labels their comments about georeferencing errors are valuable.
There's a reference too about a topic raised recently on this forum (https://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?id=7134)
It is unfortunate that GBIF still do not allow their users to easily provide feedback on specific records, e.g. correcting misidentifications and erroneous georeferencing
All in all it is very positive about Big Data and is a highly quotable paper.