Who, what, where and when? Among the basic elements of scientific record-keeping, too often the 'where?' gets neglected. Now advances in satellite-positioning technology, online databases and geographical information systems offer opportunities to make good that neglect, and to add a much-needed spatial dimension to many types of biological research. Location data are essential for those modelling species' responses to climate change, or the spread of viruses, for example. Failure to include spatial information from the get-go may close off potentially highly productive routes to analysis — including those not yet foreseen. But those data are frequently inadequate or absent.

Many museums and herbaria are trying to make good this problem as best they can, geo-referencing their collections and putting them online. This frequently requires nightmarish work translating place names from various historical eras, languages and conventions into latitudes and longitudes. Although this is a necessary evil in matters retrospective, going forward there is a much simpler and easier answer in the form of coordinates and a time-stamp taken from the Global Positioning System (GPS) at the point of capture, or any other specified point of relevance.

This technology means that there is now much less excuse for allowing spatial data to fall by the wayside simply because they are not relevant to the data collectors' project in hand. Not only are the data easily collected, they are easily stored too. GenBank, for example, introduced fields for latitude and longitude in the metadata attached to its nucleotide sequence records in 2005. But few yet contain such information.

Gene sequence and structure databases have flourished in part because journals require authors to submit published data to them. It is worth considering a similar requirement that all samples in a published study be registered, along with GPS coordinates, in online databases such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. At the same time, it would behove spatial scientists to articulate to the broader research community the potential of recording and making accessible spatial data in the appropriate formats — and the painlessness of the process.