The Geocoordinate Validation Service (GVS) validates decimal geographic coordinates and flags common errors in species-occurrence records. It checks whether coordinates fall on land or in the ocean, detects points that coincide with political-division centroids — a frequent artifact of georeferencing to a country or province rather than to a precise locality — and returns the political division information associated with each point using the GeoNames and Global Administrative Areas (GADM) databases. Geocoordinate validation is one of several data-cleaning operations performed on the BIEN database, complementing the political geovalidation provided by the GNRS.

The GVS is publicly available. Non-programmers can validate up to 5,000 records interactively, including CSV or text-file upload, using the GVS website. Programmatic access is available through the GVS R package on CRAN (see the GVS vignette). Try the GVS now!