This should not be the way that coordinates are used for bodies of water. The marker should be in the middle of a body of water, not where the first species found in that river was caught.If the waterway was originally entered with a specific Lat/Long coordinate corresponding to a specific collection locality for once species, then that pin is more important than just "midway" along the river - it is the actual location of the fish. Now imagine that tomorrow I want to add an occurrence for a different species along the same waterway, but this fish is not from the same Lat/Long coordinates
The idea here was rather to have specific named region, e.g. "Cachioera do Belo Monte" as part of Lower Xingu. - Ideally we'd then also have "Lower Xingu above Cachioera do Belo Monte", etc - as well as Lower Xingu to represent fishes that occur everywhere in the river.Mats, you mentioned the idea of subdividing bodies of water. I think this is a good idea when a body of water can be subdivided into smaller segments, each with its own distinct textual name.
However, the point is still that we're not intended to precisely recording capture localities, but a general rough idea of the distribution of the fish.
It wouldn't be very hard, in my view, to add another database table, where we could record actual locations where fish has been captured in lat/long - it would take a little bit of programming to add this feature.
The real work is to add the data, I think we can do it automatically, although I couldn't quite figure out how to get the occurrences for a particular species in the GBIF database above - and of course, automatically importing data has it's own problems. Take this example: http://www.gbif.org/species/5961451 (Ancisturs dolichopterus). Which looks fine, except for the ONE point way south of all the others, which I'm pretty sure isn't a correct identification.
Whether we do this automatically or manually, we probably want to do some sort of manual override, such that we can "hide" or "delete" data that we think is incorrect. And I think we should have a script that fetches and parses the data from GBIF rather than fetch on demand, as this will allow us to control the data better - most importanly by adding our own data without having to wait for someone to add it to the GBIF dataset first.
It's trivial to mark these with a different marker than the "big dot" and "star" that we have so far - we probably should have a foot, ehm, legend to explain what the different symbols actually represent.
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Mats
