Missing some museum data on a global search on an order

I’m relatively new to GBIF and I am NOT a biologist. I’m working as the GIS coordinator on a couple of books focused on Arizona Amph & Reps. I’m obtaining data from GBIF as well as Symbiota. My issue is that when I’ve searched on an order (i.e., Squamata) in GBIF where location == United States and State/Province == Arizona the result set does not contain certain observations located at certain museums (i.e., LACM and MSB). However, when I search on Squamata for the same location / state/province but specify a museum code, I obtain the missing data. I’ve searched on these two museums based upon input from two editors. I can only surmise that I’ll be hearing from other editors when they begin reviewing their assigned genus / species.

Can anyone explain why this is happening?

Thanks, Karen

Hi Karen,

Could provide direct links to the searches you’re comparing? Makes it’s a lot easier to diagnose :slight_smile:

Thanks,
Daniel

Hi Daniel,
Please note, I did the original GBIF search in the winter of 2023-2024; I did the MSB search in April of 2024 at the request of one of the editors who discovered the missing data.

Link 01:
Major Groups: Animalia / Chordata / Squamata
Country: United States of America
State / Province: Arizona (there are several misspellings of Arizona – I did a search on all of them in the original search back in 2023-2024, so this particular search is incomplete simply because of the variations in Arizona)
Occurrence Status: Present
Result Set: 35,005,135

Search

Thanks,
Karen

Daniel,
Here’s the 2nd Link (MSB qualifier) – since I’m a new user I’m only able to include one link in my posts.

Link 02:
Major Groups: Animalia / Chordata / Squamata
Country: United States of America
State / Province: Arizona (Again, in April 2024, I did a search on all variations of Arizona)
Occurrence Status: Present
Institution Code: MSB
Result Set: 2,550

Search

Thanks,
Karen

Hi @KarenB

Many data providers don’t fill the “province” information for their occurrence records. This is why their records don’t appear in the search for “Arizona”.

If you use the GADM filter for example, you might get more results as the administrative areas are inferred based on the coordinates provided: Search (more data providers share coordinates than they share the province information).

Does this give you what you are looking for?

If you are only interested in records that have coordinates, you could use a spatial search (WKT) to get around the missing province values.