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Georeferencing refers to the laborious effort of translating textual locality descriptions into coordinates (or shapes) that can be mapped and are computer readable. The application of an estimate of spatial error can also be included as part of the georeferencing effort, which makes the data more useful since records with large spatial uncertainty can be filtered out if needed. Use of modern GPS at the time of data collection typically negates the need for this manual georeferencing and thus newer data often come with coordinates taken in the field and with a presumed small spatial error.
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