The scattered records

The volunteers had recorded some plant observations on a tablet and others in three notebooks, so every entry had to be brought together. Rain had spread the ink across one notebook, making several measurements impossible to read. When the electronic entries were rearranged, the location column moved without the plant names, leaving observations matched to the wrong areas. Two volunteers appeared to have recorded the same plants using slightly different descriptions, but nobody could be certain which entries were duplicates. Several locations were identified only by abbreviations that had not been explained.

Describe the difficulties of producing a usable record of the observations. You may support your points with brief quotations.