Visotheary UNG

Convenors

• Francisco Pando - Real Jardín Botánico-CSIC, Madrid
• Nicolas Bailly - FishBase/SeaLifeBase, Q‑quatics, Philippines; Beaty Biodiversity Museum and Sea Around Us, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
• Visotheary Ung - ISYEB, CNRS, Muséum national d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris

Motivation

Knowledge of species’ geographical distributions is critical to understanding evolutionary processes, changes in ecological communities, and now most importantly the conservation of biodiversity. Ultimately, our knowledge of species distributions comes from assembling records of specimens and observations made by many individuals over many years. Tasks required to compile occurrence data include documenting locations when specimens or observations are collected, extracting and harmonizing data from many sources, georeferencing collecting localities without geocoordinates, applying quality control, and analyzing occurrence data against other geospatial phenomena. Almost all of these tasks can be facilitated if the biological records are connected to a common scheme of hierarchically organized named areas or geospatial entities.

The most commonly used spatial hierarchies are based on administrative entities, such as countries, states, provinces, counties, etc., but typically these entities have only moderate correspondence with natural features that influence species distributions. For these reasons one of the earliest standards created and ratified by TDWG was the World Geographic Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD, Hollis & Brummit 1992; Brummit 2001), which provided a hierarchical system of terrestrial entities that better reflect biogeographic regions while also specifying their relationships to administrative entities. Despite the increasing prevalence of georeferenced species occurrence data, an area-based scheme to present, retrieve and communicate species spatial distribution and associate information remains relevant and needed. The approach of WGSRPD, combining adminstrative limits and biogeographical concepts in a hierarchical scheme, has been a success, as the hundreds of papers citing this standard prove. And its utility is not diminishing; in just 2020, Google Scholar identifies 43 papers that cite the WGSRPD.

Since publication of the version 2, full or partial representations of the WGSRPD have been offered as an Access database (mdb), ESRI shape files (shp), and GeoJSON. TDWG typically receives several inquiries every year about updating WGSRPD, even offers of assistance, but without an active interest group, the expressions of interest have never been coordinated into an actual update. This interest group will provide that coordination.

Purpose and Scope

The purpose of this interest group is to coordinate the development of one or more geographical schemes, including standard names, abbreviations, and boundaries, that are practically useful for managing occurrence data and species distributions. This interest group will update the WGSRPD, will apply the same approach to marine areas to make the coverage global, and will maintain the standard(s) going forward. In addition to the text, areas will be provided under various digital formats (database, GeoJSON, shapefiles, …).

World Flora is an international consortium of 42 partners which aims to provide an online flor of the plants of the world.