Common and Historical Collecting Localities within Canada

Labels associated with specimens of insects and other arthropods (or indeed any biological specimen) contain much data (see: Label Data Standards for Terrestrial Arthropods). These data can be used in many different ways and for many different purposes; perhaps the most common are distribution maps of the range of distribution of the organism in question. Such distribution maps again can be used at various levels of resolution and for various purposes. Many distribution maps are now produced electronically and are analyzed by a number of different kinds of software.

The purpose of providing this database of common and historical collecting data is to standardize the locality data for historical collecting sites and augment it with commonly encountered Canadian localities. Uniting these datasets makes this resource more complete and usable for researchers and collections managers. This should be a living document as more historically important collection data are accumulated and put into electronic format. We invite users of this database to submit corrections, additions, notations, or alterations. Please contact the Biological Survey at bsc@mus-nature.ca.

Click here to download the database in Microsoft Excel format. (7.3 MB, last updated April 17, 2008)

Click here to download the database as an Adobe Acrobat file. (3.1 MB, last updated April 17, 2008)

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Rob Roughley and Michael Alperyn (University of Manitoba) for compiling this database. Records were provided by: Andy Hamilton (Canadian National Collection of Insects, Arachnids, and Nematodes), Rob Roughley (University of Manitoba), Geoff Scudder (University of British Columbia), Danny Shpeley (University of Alberta) and most of the common localities were extracted from the United States National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency world locality database .

This page last updated 08/28/2009