A software application developed under the leadership of a Florida State University Geography Professor won the joint first prize in the 2022 GBIF Ebbe Nielsen Challenge.
Xiao Feng, Ph.D., led the team that developed GridDER: Grid Detection and Evaluation in R, an open-source software package that identifies potential sources of inaccuracy arising from the use of gridded surveys in occurrences.
Data curators can use the package to simulate the original grids where details have gone missing, while users can better account for uncertainties associated with gridded coordinates and adjust their analyses accordingly.
“Gridded coordinates, often from gridded surveys, are broadly used in biological studies, but their usage in aggregated format can be problematic because the associated spatial and environmental uncertainties can get lost,” said Feng. “Our team developed the GridDER package to enhance the usage of gridded coordinates by matching coordinates to the original grid definitions, which fills in the missing coordinate uncertainty.”
Feng, who heads the Quantitative Biogeography Lab in FSU’s Department of Geography, worked on the project with colleagues from Instituto de Pesquisas Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro (JBRJ) and the Department of Biological Sciences and Center for Plant Biology at Purdue University.