Vascular plants occurrences in Dokdo islands, Korea, based on herbarium collections and legacy botanical literature

The content providers reviewed carefully individual floristic publications to manage the irregularity in the format of the historical papers. All occurrence records were merged into a spreadsheet, and a record of occurrence data holds original species names found at the location. In this stage of the digitization process, obvious typographic errors were corrected. Accepted taxon names and taxonomic classification, as derived from the local checklist (Chang et al., 2014), were included in the spreadsheets. The outcome of the above digitization steps was 843 records with 25 columns containing occurrence data of 108 vascular plant taxa.The layout of the BRAHMS database was made using MS ACCESS. All specimen and occurrence information was captured in the BRAHMS (Botanical Research and Herbarium Management System) database of T.B. Lee herbarium.In literature data, we frequently encountered several uncertain dates for field works, for example, July 13, 2017, September 26, 2017, April 17, 2018, June 19-20, 2018, September 18, 2018, for 68 collections by Park et al. (2018). When the collection date was written as “several dates,” we transcribed the last dates of field works on day, month, year, or their equivalent in eventDate field and the rest of the general information in the verbatimEventDate field. Park and Lee (2008) and Park et al. (2017) published the floristic list of Dokdo islands with many vascular plants pictures. Because these authors have not provided the collection information, we use the publication year as the year of events.All occurrence records were georeferenced, either from the coordinates provided in the paper or from the geographic description of the localities. The coordinate uncertainty in meters for each occurrence was estimated according to the algorithm described by Chapman (2005).Occurrence data in Brahms could be easily exported in various formats, including Darwin Core for uploading to the EABCN IPT. The Darwin Core standard was applied to the BRHMS extract/query file structure to accommodate the relevant information extracted from the publications.