organismswhere

organismswhere is a neologism used in ecology and biodiversity informatics to denote the spatial and environmental context surrounding observations of living beings. It refers to the data that describe where an organism occurs, including geographic coordinates, habitat type, microhabitat characteristics, and associated environmental conditions such as temperature and precipitation. The term is not widely standardized in textbooks but appears in some projects as a convenient label for the location-related component of biological records, to complement taxonomic and occurrence data.

In practice, organismswhere data are attached to records from field surveys, museum collections, citizen science platforms, and remote sensing, enabling researchers to map distributions and to perform species distribution modeling and niche analyses. Attributes commonly included are latitude, longitude, altitude, habitat category, land cover, and climate variables. The concept emphasizes location as a core component of biological data, alongside who, what, and when.

Challenges include coordinate uncertainty, spatial bias in sampling, privacy and protection of sensitive locations, and inconsistent metadata standards across databases. Standard adoption remains variable; some projects use formal metadata schemas that cover spatial context, while others use ad hoc tags that function as informal proxies for location information.

See also: niche, ecological niche, species distribution, biogeography, occurrence data, GBIF, iNaturalist.