WGSRPD Level 3 area codes, names and country concordance

The tabular component of the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD): one row per Level 3 unit ("Botanical Country"), giving its code, name, parent Level 2 region, and - where the source standard supplies one - the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code of the country it belongs to.

Usage

Level3maping

Format

A data.table with 369 rows and 6 variables:

L3 code: Three-letter WGSRPD Level 3 code, e.g. "AGE". Unique; joins to LEVEL3_COD in WGSRPD3 and to area_code_l3 in Distributions.
L3 area: Name of the Level 3 unit, e.g. "Argentina Northeast". Boundaries follow political borders or coastlines, but the units are botanical rather than political: large countries are subdivided, and small ones may be grouped.
L2 code: Code of the parent Level 2 (regional) unit. Stored as text with a comma decimal mark, e.g. "85,00", as in the source file.
L3 ISOcode: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code, or "" when the source standard gives none. See Details before using this column to map country codes onto areas.
Ed2status: Amendment flag carried over verbatim from the source table. Empty for 366 areas; "N" for Belarus (BLR) and Suriname (SUR), "T" for the Chagos Archipelago (CGS). The source standard should be consulted for the meaning of these codes.
Notes: Free-text note from the source table. Populated for three areas only: alternative spellings for Belarus and Suriname, and a Level 2 code remark for the Chagos Archipelago.

Source

Details

Level 3 is the level at which the World Checklist of Vascular Plants records distributions, so L3 code is the key shared with Distributions and with the polygon map in WGSRPD3. All 369 codes are present in WGSRPD3.

L3 ISOcode is reproduced as published and is not a complete or one-to-one concordance. Three properties matter when using it to translate an occurrence record's countryCode into candidate Level 3 areas:

Many areas share one country code. A single ISO code usually maps to several Level 3 units: US to 51, RU to 21, CA to 13, CN and AU to 8 each. Only 138 of the represented countries map to exactly one area, so an ISO code generally identifies a set of areas, not one area.
42 areas carry no ISO code at all, among them the mainland units for France (FRA), Italy (ITA), Spain (SPA), Austria (AUT), Belgium (BGM), Ireland (IRE), Ukraine (UKR) and Korea (KOR). Because some offshore units of the same countries do carry a code, a naive lookup silently returns the islands alone: "FR" resolves to Corse, "IT" to Sardegna, and "ES" to the Baleares and Canary Islands. This yields a plausible but wrong area rather than no answer.
One code is inconsistent with current usage. Belarus (BLR) is listed under ISO RU, reflecting the standard's 2001 vintage; records coded BY therefore find no area, and records coded RU gain Belarus as a candidate.

References

R. K. Brummitt. 2001. World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions, Edition 2. Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh). http://rs.tdwg.org/wgsrpd/doc/data/