Biogeo : an R package for assessing and improving data quality of occurrence record datasets

摘要

Occurrence data from museum and herbarium collections are valuable for mappingbiodiversity patterns in space and time. Unfortunately these collections datasets containmany errors and suffer from several data quality issues that can influence the quality of theproducts derived from them. It is up to the user to identify these errors and data qualityissues when using these data. Despite the large number of potential users of these datasetsthere are few software tools dedicated to error detection and correction of collectionsdatasets. The R package biogeo was developed for detecting and correcting errors and forassessing of data quality of collections datasets consisting of occurrence records. Features ofthe package include error detection, such as mismatches between the recorded country andthe country where the record is plotted, records of terrestrial species that fall into the seaand outlier detection. A key feature of the package is the ability to identify likely alternativepositions for points that represent obvious errors in the dataset and functions to explorerecords in geographical and environmental space in order to identify possible errors in thedataset. Functions are also available for converting coordinates that are in various textformats into degrees, minutes and seconds and then into decimal degrees.