The Geographic Name Resolution Service (GNRS) resolves political division names and codes using the GeoNames database of geographic place names, indexing 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 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.
Examples and vignette: GNRS vignette.
Citation: Chamberlain, S. A. et al. (2022). GNRS: A Geographic Name Resolution Service for standardizing and georeferencing political division names. PLOS ONE 17(11): e0268162. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268162.
Access the GNRS
- GNRS web interface — for non-programmers.
- GNRS API — programmatic access.
- GNRS R package — from within R.