1. Canonical identity
KoreAves anchors Korean and scientific identity to the KBR 2025 canonical checklist. For the public release, AviList v2025b supplies an English common name only when the KBR scientific name matches AviList at the same taxonomic rank exactly; otherwise the scientific name remains the display fallback. Internal reconciliation artifacts are not promoted into a public taxonomic claim.
2. Evidence eligibility
Source records are normalized before they support a public claim. Taxonomic membership, source-specific semantics, coordinate usability and claim-specific eligibility remain separate decisions. A record can be retained for provenance while being excluded from a particular public or regional claim.
3. Regional projection
Eligible coordinates are projected into South Korea's current 17 first-level administrative divisions using SGIS 2025 geometry and true polygon containment. Bounding boxes are used only as a candidate prefilter. Exact shared-boundary ambiguity is not assigned arbitrarily.
Boundary contract: SGIS_20250630_SIDO_WGS84_POLYGON_CONTAINS_V2
4. Search-readable claims
Visible summaries, metadata and structured data are compiled from the same versioned semantic claim bundle. The compiler can state documented region and source support, but it cannot infer abundance, residency, breeding, habitat preference, population trend or biological absence.
5. Regional evidence overlap
When two or three taxa are compared, KoreAves partitions South Korea's 17 first-level administrative regions into three evidence states: all selected taxa documented, partial overlap, or none documented. This compares independently documented evidence within the same administrative region; it does not mean the birds were recorded together, at the same site, or at the same time. Missing eligible evidence does not imply biological absence.
6. Provenance and publication lanes
Semantic eligibility is not publication clearance. KoreAves tracks source provenance and rights constraints independently, and a public aggregate never implies permission to redistribute underlying source records.