Questionable suitability of pure geological publications to distant inventory of world-class palaeogeographical geosites

Abstract

AbstractPresent acceleration of interest in geoheritage makes urgent a very large inventory of geosites in all parts of the world, which task cannot be achieved by only geoconservationists. Pure geological publications seem to be promising to deal with geosites without visiting them. To realize the existence of such an opportunity, ten fresh examples of research articles reporting exceptional palaeogeographical localities from the different geographical domains and geological time slices were considered. A semi-quantitative, score-based assessment of suitability (quality) of the published information was undertaken. This procedure should be distinguished from geosite evaluation, which is not the aim of this study. It was found that the outcomes of pure geological research published in journal articles can really help to identify world-class geosites, although the information from these articles is not enough to characterize geosites (especially regarding such properties as accessibility and vulnerability). Finding additional literature and realizing conservation status are the other challenges of geosite inventories based on only journal articles. Some recommendations for writing geoheritage-unrelated articles so to satisfy the needs of geoconservation were given.