I have been working on a project to collate species occurrence data inherent from unpublished student theses in an integrated database (currently published in GBIF) and still working on a systematic protocol of data validation. Expert review is really subjective and I got many findings that said "expert" estimation were not always more consistent than amateurs, student, or even public enthusiasts (feel free to message me for the papers I collected regarding this), thus my team was still struggling to find a way. Our current method is just independently evaluate the scientific names through taxonomic checklists and the geographic distribution were validated through available published literature mentioning the geographic distribution of each species. We occasionally ask experts but as we are working on many understudied taxa and geographical area, there was not many around.