Abstract: The research potential for data associated with museum specimens of insect vectors has changed dramatically due to the production of tools and community coordination around digitization and mobilization. However, many specimen records still only have textual descriptions of geographic locations where collecting occurred. Georeferencing - the conversion of these textual descriptions to mappable coordinates with associated uncertainties - still remains a significant bottleneck to the ready use of these data. The majority of data records published to aggregators such as iDigBio and GBIF still lack proper georeferences. The standards and best practices for georeferencing are mature. Tools such as Geolocate support generation of georeferencing metadata reflecting those best practices, e.g. valid coordinates, datum and information about spatial uncertainty. Of all the means to speed up georeferencing, one that potentially requires the least amount of extra work is to find and use a location record that is already properly georeferenced. Enter BELS: Biodiversity Enhanced Locality Services, built around a database of previously georeferenced locations found in GBIF, iDigBio, and the VertNet collaborative georeferencing projects. Using this gazetteer, we determine how many non-georeferenced locations may have georeferences retrieved from previous efforts. In this process, we explore these databases to determine the number and quality of the data available. Finally, we explore use-case datasets to examine the value of BELS for the community. We also discuss the integration of the gazetteer in commonly used tools such as GeoLocate and Symbiota. Integration with existing toolchains assures maximal uptake by the community.
