GEOREFERENCING CRETACEOUS MOLLUSCA OF THE WESTERN INTERIOR SEAWAY IN A GIS FRAMEWORK: UPDATE

As part of an NSF TCN grant, georeferencing Cretaceous Molluscan localities, capturing associated specimen data, and imaging specimens of the Western Interior Seaway began in the fall of 2016. (Digitization TCN: Collaborative Research: Cretaceous World: Digitizing Fossils to Reconstruct Evolving Ecosystems in WIS. NSF award 1601891). The digitization project was completed May 2019. A collection of 12,127 lots (80,000 specimens) of Cretaceous Mollusca from 644 localities were catalogued and imaged, and compiled data was submitted to aggregators iDigBio and GBIF. These data were used to facilitate the development of a WebApp (presented at GSA Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, 2018) to enhance research in macroevolutionary studies in a GIS framework by making the data accessible and discoverable. Specifically, georeferencing information for 500 localities were compiled from about 10,000 museum lots using several programs, chiefly GEOlocate, Google Maps, and Google Earth while following the MaNIS/HerpNet/ORNIS georeferencing guidelines. TRS data were treated in GEOLocate, and when this approach did not work, we geocoded in a GIS framework. Once the locality information was converted to lat/long coordinates, a table of 10,000 rows and tens of attributes of different kinds was assembled, which underwent a series of automated and manual data-cleansing procedures. As a result two related tables were produced: the localities and the specimens. This presentation shows the resulting locality and specimen tables after they were transferred to a GIS system and include a digital map in a Maps Portal Application (WebApp). The WebApp uses filtering and querying tools on the primary attributes of the specimens and allows users a choice of options to perform further data cleansing as well as data retrieval; the tool also connects museum collections to associated localities and provides a geological context for fossils collected at respective sites. Continuing efforts are being made to standardize and increase the completeness/validity of existing data to improve accessibility and refine searches of paleontologic data for use in paleoceanographic/paleoclimate models as well as to enhance user options of the WebApp and generated maps.