Coordinates from Rana Museum

[vidarbakken]

I got an excel spreadsheet with some strange coordinates. This is an example:

UTM KARTREF VP5852 | 33WVP55 VP5548 | 33WVP54

I have asked him for a comment to this.

[vidarbakken]

I got a reply from Rana Museum. Earlier they had Access as a database, but started to use excel instead! They have a long way to go to get a good management system for their collections! I will guess that the coordinate given in the example is 33W VP 5852. This is not an UTM-reference, but a MGRS-coordinate. The accuracy is 1 km.

[rukayaj]

Did you manage to fix their coordinates, @vidarbakken ?

[vidarbakken]

I haven't heard anything from them since I sent the last message. I suspect the answer is what I wrote in the previous message. We can close this issue for the moment.

[dagendresen]

MGRS tuple 33W VP 58 52 = Decimal Latitude 66.28508 Decimal Longitude 14.06413 Which is located in Rana, Norland

[dagendresen]

MGRS is a rather common georeference format among Norwegian botanists ;-)

[MichalTorma]

My guess is that in their notation VP5852 | 33WVP55 they use the second part (33WVP55) for some sort of crude clustering since it only contains coordinates in very low precision of 10km [1]. The first part has a slightly higher precision of 1km (but lacks the UTM grid definition) so when you combine them, you get 33W VP 58 52. To test if it's true, I've converted the high precision coordinates to WGS86 and converted them back to MGRS at lower precision and as you can see, we got 33WVP55 back

import mgrs

mgrs_object = mgrs.MGRS()

coors = mgrs_object.toLatLon('33WVP5852')
print(coors)

(66.28507533173716, 14.064129665195587)

low_prcision_mgrs = mgrs_object.toMGRS(coors[0],coors[1], MGRSPrecision=1)
print(low_prcision_mgrs)

33WVP55

[dagendresen]

@vidarbakken maybe share the spreadsheet with Michal (if you, Michal can help with batch conversion of the MGRS coordinates?)? If we help them to convert the coordinates - is the collection in other aspects ok to publish? Maybe useful to add their data to the GBIF UAT test portal??? The contact point is Vetle Løveng velo@helmus.no -- right?

[vidarbakken]

I have found a system for MGRS batch coversion: http://legallandconverter.com/mgrsbatch.html Before we do anything more I must have a dialogue with Vetle about how to proceede. So far we have only got some examples of data they have. He has just started in the position at the museum.