The Geographic Name Resolution Service (GNRS) resolves political division names and codes using the GeoNames database of geographic place names and indexes them against political division spatial objects in the Natural Earth and Global Administrative Areas (GADM) databases. Among other uses, this enables what we call "political geovalidation" of species observations: checking that the observation coordinates fall within the declared country, state and county of observation. Political geovalidation is one of many data cleaning operations performed on the BIEN database.

The GNRS is publicly available and can be accessed using the GNRS API, the GNRS R package, and for non-programmers, the GNRS website. Try the GNRS now!