Abstract
Issues Involved with Incorporating Museum Collections into GIS Analytical Studies
Track: User Presentations - Research
Authors: Dan Cole
Museum collections are vital in determining where species were located in the past so that predictions of those same species might be in the future given climate change or other human-induced environmental changes. In a similar manner, museum collections of cultures allow the preservation and study of former and extant groups and their characteristics. The Smithsonian holds more than 127 million objects and artifacts in its natural history collections. These data are held in the EMu database and extracted for mapping (via Google Earth) and GIS analyses (via ArcGIS). This presentation will discuss the problems and pitfalls, as well as the successes, associated with these databases.