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Issue tracking for TTU Mammals data in the VertNet portal (portal.vertnet.org).
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[TTU Mammals 84773] Artibeus obscurus - VerbatimLatitude and VerbatimLongitude fields uninterpretable #11

Closed rdmpage closed 9 years ago

rdmpage commented 9 years ago

The values in VerbatimLatitude and VerbatimLongitude (9840350 and 166624, respectively) are uninterpretable. I suspect that something has gone wrong with the data export.

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You can view the original detail page on VertNet. Here are the original record contents:

Term Value
InstitutionID urn:lsid:biocol.org:col:34902
InstitutionCode TTU
CollectionCode Mammals
BasisOfRecord PreservedSpecimen
OccurrenceID urn:catalog:TTU:Mammals:84773
CatalogNumber 84773
RecordNumber 157
RecordedBy BAKER, R J ET AL; HAYNIE, M L
IndividualCount 1
Sex female
LifeStage adult
OccurrenceStatus present
Preparations skin in alcohol, body skeleton
EventDate 2001
Year 2001
Day 7
VerbatimEventDate 7/19/2001
FieldNumber 104001
HigherGeography ;ECUADOR;PASTAZA DISTRICT;;;;;
Country ECUADOR
StateProvince PASTAZA DISTRICT
Locality 5 KM E PUYO, SAFARI HOSTERIA PARK
VerbatimLocality ECUADOR; PASTAZA DISTRICT; ; 5 KM E PUYO, SAFARI HOSTERIA PARK
VerbatimLatitude 9840350
VerbatimLongitude 166624
ScientificName Artibeus obscurus
HigherClassification ARTIBEUS
Kingdom Animalia
Phylum Chordata
Class Mammalia
Order Chiroptera
Family Phyllostomidae
Genus Artibeus
SpecificEpithet obscurus
TaxonRank species
NomenclaturalCode ICZN
rdmpage commented 9 years ago

OK, the records are not quite "uninterpretable". After tracking down the TTU Mammal database website http://www.nsrl.ttu.edu/search/vertsearch.html I searched for catalogue number 84773 and discovered that the values in VerbatimLatitude and VerbatimLongitude are Northing and Easting values, respectively https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easting_and_northing.

ttu

Converting Easting: 166624 and Northing: 9840350 to latitude and longtitude via https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/UsefulData/ConvertUTMNoOZ.HTM (setting zone to 18 and the "south of the equator" flag) yields lat -1.441838 long -77.995536, which puts the specimen here:

map

This is not far from Puyo, which is the VerbatimLocality field.

AFAIK Darwin Core doesn't support Easting and Northings, but the TTU database has dumped them into the verbatim coordinates, which means we lose information. Ideally the conversion to lat and long would be made before export to Darwin Core.

tucotuco commented 9 years ago

The VertNet migrator (https://github.com/VertNet/toolkit) for the TTU data set was updated to version 2015-01-27. This version putting the original ZONE EASTING NORTHING fields into the Darwin Core verbatimCoordinates field with "UTM" in the Darwin Core verbatimCoordinateSystem field. No attempt is made to interpret the UTM coordinates automatically. EASTING and NORTHING are no longer mapped to verbatimLatitude and verbatimLongitude (see http://portal.vertnet.org/o/ttu/mammals?id=84773).