[Feature request] Do not truncate extra zeros in lat/long values

[themerekat]

From Sue C:

"For locations of my Research Observations, I enter the latitude and longitude in decimal degrees to 5 decimal places (taken from the GPS in my iPhone), e.g. 31.39928, -111.24422.

Occasionally, these coordinates end in one or more zeroes, e.g. 28.90110, -109.51420 (Specimen being referenced: https://swbiodiversity.org/seinet/collections/individual/index.php?occid=31265677) or 31.52718, -110.89400 (Specimen being referenced: https://swbiodiversity.org/seinet/collections/individual/index.php?occid=29805428). I enter them as shown on my device, to 5 decimal places.

The Symbiota system, however, drops these zeroes in the digitized record, or at least drops them from what is displayed, which seems odd to me. It’s as if the system considers zeroes irrelevant, even though they are just as informative and valid as are 1s, 2s, etc. If my longitude was -110.89401 instead of -110.89400, it would display to 5 decimal places, with the implied precision of 5 decimal places....

The removal of the zeroes changes the precision of my coordinates quite a lot: 5 decimal places is precise to about 1.1 meters, whereas 3 decimal places has a precision of about 111 meters (see Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_degrees). And if I happened someday to enter a specimen record collected at 31.50000 and -110.80000 (a real point in Santa Cruz County!), I’m pretty sure the system would display the location as “31.5” and “-110.8” which is so vague a location as to be nearly useless, with a precision of about 11 kilometers.

(I realize my iPhone GPS and that of other handheld devices are not always accurate, but that’s a separate issue.)

Maybe the system maps things correctly but just doesn’t display the extra zeroes. But for anyone else looking at the record and recording the coordinates, the location displayed not be as precise as what I entered."