The Mushroom Observer provides two ways to represent the geographic location of an observation. The simplest are latitude and longitude positions associated with the observation. Please keep these accurate to within at least 300 meters (or about 1000 feet). However, the more widely used method is a simple phrase describing the location. For example, “Beebe Woods, Falmouth, Massachusetts, USA”. The goal of these location names is to provide a consistent, reusable way of talking about where an observation was made without necessarily revealing a precise “spot”. If you are comfortable provide more precise lat/longs for an observation, the location names are still useful for searches so you are encouraged to provide them as well. The location names should, by default, go from the smallest contained area to the country name. If you prefer to describe your locations as going from the largest (country) down to the smallest contained area, you can change your preference from the default, “Postal”, to “Scientific” on your preference page. There are cases such as “Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Blount Co., Tennessee, USA”, where the area you are describing overlaps a number of counties, states or even countries. In these cases, the country and other official political boundaries should come at the end as shown in the example.

Some examples

Bad	Good	Explanation
Albion,California, USA	Albion, California, USA	Consistent and Reversible Order
Albion, California	Albion, California, USA	Use Country Names
Earth	Unknown	Use Country Names
USA, North America	North America	Use Country Names
San Francisco, USA	San Francisco, California, USA	Use State Names
San Francisco, CA, USA	San Francisco, California, USA	Use State Names
San Francisco, San Francisco Co., California, USA	San Francisco, California, USA	Counties OR Cities
Tilden Park, California, USA	Tilden Park, Contra Costa Co., California, USA	Counties OR Cities *
Tilden Park, Kensington, California, USA	Tilden Park, Contra Costa Co., California, USA	Counties OR Cities *
Albis Mountain Range, Zurich area, Switzerland	Albis Mountain Range, Near Zurich, Switzerland	Use 'Near'
Southern California, California, USA	Southern California, USA	Use of 'Southern', 'Northern' etc. *
South California, USA	Southern California, USA	Use of 'Southern', 'Northern' etc.
Western Australia	Western Australia, Australia	Use of 'Southern', 'Northern' etc.
Mt Tam SP, Marin County, CA, USA.	Mount Tamalpais State Park, Marin Co., California, USA	Avoid Abbreviations
Washington, DC, USA	Washington DC, USA	Avoid Abbreviations
bedford, new york, usa	Bedford, New York, USA	Other Things to Avoid
Hong Kong, China N22.498, E114.178	Hong Kong, China	Other Things to Avoid
Washington DC, USA in wood chips	Washington DC, USA	Other Things to Avoid
Washington DC, USA (near the mall)	The Mall, Washington DC, USA	Other Things to Avoid
Montréal, Québec, Canada	Montreal, Quebec, Canada	Other Things to Avoid
10th Ave. & Lincoln Way, San Francisco, CA USA	10th Ave. and Lincoln Way, San Francisco, California, USA	Other Things to Avoid

* These are cases that are not detected automatically, so no warning would be given.

The Current “Rules”

1. Consistent and Reversible Order – You can now ask for location names to appear in the reverse order from the default. Thus, you can see a location as either:

   Albion, California, USA

   or as

   USA, California, Albion

   You can change this on your Preferences page by selecting ‘Postal’ (the default) or ‘Scientific’ (the one that starts with the country). When you input new location names it will of course also follow your preferred order.

   Roy Halling was the inspiration for this feature when he started putting in his locations starting with the country names and we got into a discussion about it. Apparently the standard practice in the scientific community is to start with the largest locale (typically a country) and work down to the smallest locale (a county, town or specific location). From looking through all the locations that have been put into MO, it is clear that most people expect to put in the smallest location first and work up to the country.

   In order to enable this feature, I have had to require that the place names be easily and consistently reversible. This means you must separate each section of the location with a ’, ’ (no period, no missing spaces, no double spaces). It also means that you should always enter the names in order of increasing size when you can. There are some specific exceptions to this rule that are discussed below.

2. Use Country Names – As a further check when you enter an unfamiliar location, it will check to see that the largest locale has been previously entered for some other location. This list currently consists of only countries, continents and the special location ‘Unknown’. Since it does not include all possible countries, it is still possible to override the check by resubmitting the same name twice. Such entries will be reviewed carefully to ensure that this list remains clean. For now you should only enter country names as they are written in English. For example, please use ‘Germany’ rather than ‘Deutschland’. The goal for the moment is simply consistency. However, the long term goal is to actually allow these names to be consistently translated based on the user’s language selection. Continents should only be used if the country is not known or there is no country.

3. Use State Names – In the case of countries where I know the states, I also check for those as the next smallest area within a country. At the moment I am checking this for Canada, Australia and USA. The primary goal of this in the US at least is to ensure the uniqueness of the next element in the list. In the US it is not unusual to have the same city or county name in more than one state. If there are other countries where this check would be useful, please let me know and include an exhaustive list of all states, provinces, territories etc. To increase the understandability to people from other parts of the world, state abbreviations (even extremely standard ones) are discouraged and will create a warning. The one current exception is ‘Washington DC’. Many people are not aware of what the ‘DC’ stands for and would be unlikely to enter ‘Washington, District of Columbia’. Note that in this case I have also removed the ‘, ’ since that would cause ’USA, DC, Washington’ when in ‘Scientific’ mode.

4. Counties OR Cities – In the past, MO has encouraged the use of county names whenever they are known. The new policy is that the county should only be included when it is the smallest political area the location is contained in or when the city or town name is ambiguous. For example, what used to be described as “Berkeley, Alameda Co., California, USA” should now be given as just “Berkeley, California, USA”. This change is in part due to seeing what people actually do. Generally people have been good about using county names in the case of public lands like parks and national forests where the county is the most obvious political boundary. However, with cities and towns people often don’t know what county a city or town is in. In addition, the information is typically redundant for towns and cities in the US where they are almost always completely contained in county or they are independent of the counties and there are almost never two towns with same names in a state (there are exceptions though such as Goshen, Vermont). I’ve also found that many of the map services such as maps.google.com and maps.yahoo.com get confused if you include both the city and the county in the search string.

   That being said, there are also often areas that have a local name, but are not actually an incorporated city or town. In these cases the county name is encouraged since the names cannot be assumed to be unique. For example, “North Lakeport, Lake Co., California, USA”. Wikipedia has been the most helpful resource I’ve found for determining if a town is actually incorporated.

5. Use ‘near’ – If there is a landmark or town near to the collection location, but the smallest political boundary is a county or country, then it is helpful to mention this using the word “near”. When used this way it should always be all lowercase. For example, “Albis Mountain Range, near Zurich, Switzerland”. Looking through the old data, I found users used both “near” and “area” for this with “near” being more common. This is also better because “area” sometimes gets used for place names such as “Day-Use Area” or “Rest Area”.

6. Use of ‘Southern’, ‘Northern’ etc. – If there isn’t a known a clear landmark or town near the collection location, it is fine to use compass directions such as ‘Southern’, ‘Northern’, ‘Southwestern’ etc. In these cases always use the ‘-ern’ ending to indicate that it’s descriptive. However, these terms should be avoided if it creates ambiguity. For example, “Western Australia” is the name of an official state in Australia, so it should only be used as such and should be followed by the country name.

7. Avoid Abbreviations (and Periods in General) – Most abbreviations should be avoided since people apply them somewhat arbitrarily and inconsistently. The following are examples of abbreviations that should definitely be avoided: Hwy, Mt, Mtn, CA, BC. However, there are some specific examples, that should be used in preference to there spelled out versions. These are:

   Co. for County
   Rd. for Road
   St. for Street
   Ave. for Avenue
   Blvd. for Boulevard
   USA for United States of America
   Washington DC for Washington, District of Columbia

   Periods in general should be avoided except for the above abbreviations. They should not be used at the end of country names or as separators.
   Finally, ‘and’ should be used rather than ‘&’.

8. Other Things to Avoid – All lowercase – In general at least the leading letter of each area should be capitalized and when in doubt capitalize every leading letter.
   No lat/longs – There is now direct support for this for each observation. Do not include it in the name of a location.
   No habitat info – Habitat info should go in the notes for the observation.
   Parentheses and Braces – If you’re tempted to use parentheses or braces, stop yourself and ask if this information should be in the notes for the observation or if there is a better way to describe the location.
   Avoid diacritics (eg é, ü etc.) – As mentioned when discussing country names, you should try to use the English version of a location name when possible and English does not include diacritics. This is intended to encourage consistency and we are planning on providing proper support for other languages which will benefit from this consistency. There are certainly cases where the a city or region is only know by a name that includes diacritics. In these cases they should be used. A few simple web-searches should give you a good idea if there is a common English variation of a name (e.g., Montreal, Quebec for Montréal, Québec).

9. Stuff You Are Encouraged to Do – If you are creating a new name, take some time to figure out a good name. Searching within Mushroom Observer can be helpful. If you don’t find anything there, then look things up in Google Maps (http://maps.google.com) and Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org). Also feel free to use the notes section of either an observation or a location to be more specific.