Why do some points fall on land?
When plotting data on a map, it’s soon obvious that some of the points fall on land. While sometimes this can be a genuine mistake (of which we would be grateful if you could inform us!), in most cases this is deliberate, and a consequence of the way data are extracted from literature. Often, data comes to OBIS not with a precise georeference including a latitude/longitude pair, but as a name of a country. If this country is large, there is not always a rational way to place this observation in a point location that falls in the ocean. This is especially true for countries that border different seas or oceans. Think of a species recorded from ‘USA’ – there is no rational way of deciding in which ocean to place this observation, since the USA borders on two vastly different oceans. Also, it is in no way certain that the one observation for ‘USA’ means that the species occurs in both the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean. So we consequently plot the point representing such an observation in
