California Academy of Sciences

Georeferencing Tool:
Setup Notes and Instructions

Overview
This georeferencing tool was designed by the California Academy of Sciences to facilitate the retrospective georeferencing of textual locality descriptions. Retrospective georeferencing refers to the assignment of latitude and longitude coordinates to a textual locality description. In other words, it allows a user to derive coordinates like "39.1919, -121.4210" for a specimen that was found at "Sheep dip, near Hammonton, Yuba County." Using the tool involves several steps, including setup of the ArcView project, georeferencing, and rentegrating the newly created data. In addition, it is strongly recommended that some steps be taken to prepare the locality database by normalizing the textual localities.

Below are links to instructions relevant to each step. Throughout these steps, examples are given using a sample locality database of reptiles and amphibians from San Bernardino County, California. A printable PDF version of these instructions is also available.

Database preparation
Describes the steps involved in normalizing a locality database in order to improve efficiency and structure.

ArcView project setup
Lists the steps involved in setting up a georeferencing project, including obtaining and working with base map layers, place-name lookups, and other required files.

Georeferencing
Describes how to use the tool to georeference a set of localities.

Reintegrating data
How to extract latitude, longitude and span values from the tool and reincorporate them back into the specimen database.

Troubleshooting
Software-specific hints and suggestions.