Other areas to geocode for

[MattBlissett]

Ideas of other polygons we could add to the geocoder:

• Oceans, water bodies -- Marine Regions could supply this
• Protected areas
• States (US, Canada, Russia, China, Brazil, Australia especially), counties. ISO have a scheme example which might be appropriate
• Ecoregions

[mdoering]

There are a few here that might be of interest: http://rs.gbif.org/areas/

[MattBlissett]

• Country (and lower admin level) centroids, to use for data quality flagging (@jhnwllr).

[jhnwllr]

• https://www.naturalearthdata.com/ is a good source for admin areas.
• The CoordinateCleaner R package uses http://thematicmapping.org/downloads/world_borders.php to calculate centroids.

[jhnwllr]

Made a shapefile with known country centroids with 2km buffer around each centroid.

https://github.com/jhnwllr/gbif_shapefile_geocoder/tree/master/shapefiles/country_centroid_shapefile

[jhnwllr]

https://github.com/jhnwllr/gbif_shapefile_geocoder/blob/master/shapefile_making_R_scripts/shapefile_generator.r#L2-L47

Here is the process that I used to generate the shapefile above.

[jhnwllr]

gbif/portal-feedback#2428 also see this issue about geolocate centroids.

[mdoering]

Are ecoregions still being discussed? They make the most biological sense as a way to group occurrences and species. TDWG regions and the WWF ecoregions (TEOW) would be great for analysis.

[MortenHofft]

Not a source, but a request:
I would like to see datasets with global coverage and multiple zoom levels. GADM comes close, but miss the oceans (and is political). Ideally a bio regions with multiple resolutions (where no location on earth is uncategorised). I have looked several times in the past, but have never been able to find anything (I might have used wrong terms). Having this kind of grouping would be nice when displaying data on maps.

[dschigel]

It is important to realize the bio / eco regions are often defined, among other things, on what is occurring inside them, and therefore are very different from political borders with country->province hierarchies which basically only change historically. Bioregions are defined based on biodiversity data, and in that sense, are a secondary product, an interpretation of the data, similar to a distribution map made as an extrapolation of point occurrences. There are several bio / eco region classifications, some are hierarchical, some are flat, and there is no universal consensus classification that would be accepted everywhere - we can basically make a decision which one(s) to use based on how widespread, popular etc. they are, e.g. why not WWFs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_ecoregions and biodiversity hotspots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity_hotspot. There is some integral circularity in how bio / eco regions are defined, I think if such a choice is ever made, it should be practical, driven by convenience and need of the projected uses. We would have people in the community to consult with, if expert opinions are needed.

It would be different if such regions would be defined by the parameters independent from direct biodiversity signals, than we would be closer to the country case, for example climatic regions, maybe even soils.

[mdoering]

I would like to see datasets with global coverage and multiple zoom levels.

Both TDWG regions and the WWF ecoregions are hierarchical. WWF defines 3 levels: Ecozone, Biome and Ecoregion. TDWG defines 4.

The TDWG regions are for plants, so they target terrestrial regions only.
WWF regions are global and available for terrestrial, marine and freshwater.

For TDWG there are shape files, for WWF Layer or Shape Files available:

• WWF terrestrial
• WWF freshwater
• WWF marine

Getting advice from experts seems like a good thing to do. There seems to be forks of WWF that fix known issues: https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/191258/global-shapefile-of-biomes-ecoregions

[ManonGros]

At least one person has asked to be able to filter data according to a biome: gbif/portal-feedback#3054

[tucotuco]

This may not be the place to solicit the feedback, but if anyone has thoughts about the relative merits of pursuing the addition of the biome term to Darwin Core (see tdwg/dwc#38) I would appreciate them.

[dschigel]

In pricinple yes, but there a so many systems in addition to WWFs. I took a quick look at Taiga, and Finnish, Swedish, Russian biotop types are missing. But Biome as such would probably work. Is this something that will be deduced from coordinates, or reported by the publisher? I fear there will be a risk of massive gaps and mismatch of publishing behavior. I think if coordinates are given, reporting biomes may make more harm than good, as you would just overlay occurrences with latest trusted biome polygons and conclude if it is or not (basic GIS). Another story if biome is given and coordinates not. Overall, I am not in favor of capturing human interpretations, unless absolutely necessary (such as species identifications). Realm, biome etc + these are not "data" in the pure sense to me, but date, time, coordinates are. Label name is not :)