Do you love maps? Are you interested in learning more about biodiversity and helping science? Please join us for a fun and productive 2 hour course November 19th, 2025 from 1pm to 3pm Pacific. Georeferencing is the process of taking a text description of a place on the earth and converting it to geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude). This is a common task that needs to be completed when we digitize museum specimens. For example a label for a plant collection might say “Lebanon, Kansas,” and georeferencing means providing the exact latitude and longitude of 39.810278, -98.557222. Most museum specimens were collected before GPS units or cell phones were common,therefore a biologist in the field was often unable to accurately record where they made a collection. For this reason, it is common to use a verbal description to represent where the specimen was collected. These verbal descriptions are very valuable and can be very accurate, but they limit our ability to do things like make maps and do other kinds of spatial analyses. This is why we need your help! Our goal is to make the process of georeferencing straightforward and fun. We plan to spend the first hour covering the basics of georeferencing and the second hour doing exercises and hands-on activities. Our current project is focused on plant specimens from the California Academy of Sciences and as such our activities will focus on California, U.S.A. You don’t need to be an expert in California geography, just have an interest in learning more about it. Prerequisites: None Requirements: Computer with access to the internet GEOLocate account set up prior to training https://bit.ly/3Lr1949 Complete this step at least 5 days before the training Additional resources will be made available before the course. Date: November 19th, 2025 Time: 1pm - 3pm Pacific, 3pm - 5pm Eastern Cost: Free Where: Online via Zoom Registration: https://bit.ly/4qJoVbP