{"id":3901,"date":"2026-07-04T03:15:02","date_gmt":"2026-07-04T11:15:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bien.nceas.ucsb.edu\/bien\/tools\/gvs\/"},"modified":"2026-07-04T14:45:41","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T22:45:41","slug":"gvs","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bien.nceas.ucsb.edu\/bien\/tools\/gvs\/","title":{"rendered":"GVS"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <strong>Geocoordinate Validation Service (GVS)<\/strong> validates decimal geographic coordinates and flags common georeferencing errors, such as those found in species-occurrence records. It checks whether coordinates fall on land or in the ocean, detects points that coincide with political-division centroids &mdash; a common artifact of georeferencing to a country or province rather than to a precise locality &mdash; and returns the political-division information associated with each point using the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.geonames.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">GeoNames<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/gadm.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Global Administrative Areas (GADM)<\/a> databases.<\/p>\n<p>Geocoordinate validation is one of several data-cleaning operations performed on the BIEN database, complementing the political geovalidation provided by the <a href=\"https:\/\/bien.nceas.ucsb.edu\/bien\/tools\/gnrs\/\">GNRS<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/gvs.biendata.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-3907\" src=\"https:\/\/bien.nceas.ucsb.edu\/bien\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/gvs_screenshot_v2-1024x582.png\" alt=\"GVS web application\" width=\"1024\" height=\"582\" srcset=\"https:\/\/bien.nceas.ucsb.edu\/bien\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/gvs_screenshot_v2-1024x582.png 1024w, https:\/\/bien.nceas.ucsb.edu\/bien\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/gvs_screenshot_v2-300x171.png 300w, https:\/\/bien.nceas.ucsb.edu\/bien\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/gvs_screenshot_v2-768x437.png 768w, https:\/\/bien.nceas.ucsb.edu\/bien\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/gvs_screenshot_v2-1536x873.png 1536w, https:\/\/bien.nceas.ucsb.edu\/bien\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/gvs_screenshot_v2.png 1970w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<h2>What the GVS checks<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Whether each coordinate falls on land or in the ocean;<\/li>\n<li>Whether a point coincides with a political-division centroid (a common georeferencing artifact);<\/li>\n<li>The country, state and county in which each point falls (where available), together with the distance to the corresponding political-division centroids.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Access the GVS<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/gvs.biendata.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">GVS web interface<\/a> &mdash; validate up to 5,000 records interactively, including CSV or text-file upload.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/cran.r-project.org\/package=GVS\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">GVS R package<\/a> on CRAN (see the <a href=\"https:\/\/cran.r-project.org\/web\/packages\/GVS\/vignettes\/GVS.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">GVS vignette<\/a>) &mdash; programmatic access from within R.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Geocoordinate Validation Service (GVS) validates decimal geographic coordinates and flags common georeferencing errors, such as those found in species-occurrence records. It checks whether coordinates fall on land or in the ocean, detects points that coincide with political-division centroids &mdash; a common artifact of georeferencing to a country or province rather than to a precise [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":93,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-3901","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bien.nceas.ucsb.edu\/bien\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3901"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bien.nceas.ucsb.edu\/bien\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bien.nceas.ucsb.edu\/bien\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bien.nceas.ucsb.edu\/bien\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bien.nceas.ucsb.edu\/bien\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3901"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bien.nceas.ucsb.edu\/bien\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3912,"href":"https:\/\/bien.nceas.ucsb.edu\/bien\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3901\/revisions\/3912"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bien.nceas.ucsb.edu\/bien\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bien.nceas.ucsb.edu\/bien\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}