Forum — NBN Atlas Scotland

Atlas not available.

2021-10-30T08:23:57Z

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The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
NBN Atlas UK is working.

Christine

Help Links

2017-05-09T12:31:53Z

The Help tab on Atlas of Scotland site does not give the full range of links e.g. "How to" videos, EasyMaps, Web API, help with data analysis and a couple of guidance links are missing.

I'm not totally convinced that we need the regional sites, although it does cut down the amount of data that we have to search through, but if we're going to have them, it doesn't make sense to have to default to the main Atlas site to find help with a query.

Christine

Missing Datasets and Login Failure

2017-03-29T13:11:07Z

I have two troubling issues to report

1. Records from the OHBR datsets seem to have disappeared from the Atlas.

2. I am unable to login, the system is not recognising my e-mail address.

Both the above were working last week.

Thanks

Christine

Search return results - puzzling

2017-03-27T16:44:32Z

I'm still having a few issues with the search functionality:

1. When I search for Tachina fera I would expect a few results but 293 seems a tad excessive and will only confuse readers. Also, surrounding the string with quotation marks, which would usually make the routine search for that specific string, just returns the same 293 values.

2. Each individual row on the search results seems to contain information that's a bit confusing. On my sandbox I return the information in a more user-friendly way, by grouping results by the taxa they occur on - ordered to give the most likely/correct name at the top. Consider this search for "Tachina" which returns a genus, subgenus, accepted / recommended names and junior synonyms: http://nbn-sd-dev.nhm.ac.uk/taxonbrowse … ch=tachina

Best wishes,
Chris R.

Search CSV download

2017-03-27T16:30:58Z

Just noticed that the CSV download option on the Search results seems to generate an enormous file (53MB) that bombs out when you try to load it into Excel. I searched for "Tachina fera" and then hit the Download button. The file seems to contain genuine search results but then just lists lots of numbers in column A.

Download Records Refused and Log-in not working

2017-03-10T16:05:38Z

There have been some improvements since I last tried to use AoLS, however there are still some problems.

I've just tried to download a set of records and was refused because the reason I gave for the request, selected from the list, was invalid.
The error message appears with an Atlas of Australia heading.

I tried to log in using the account set-up previously, no joy, so I tried to set-up a new account and this wasn't working either!

Christine

Start date and end dates

2016-12-22T11:23:15Z

Not sure if this has been raised elsewhere; using this an example http://records.als.scot/occurrences/a36 … 9a58bcc018 we have:

[date not supplied] Year: 2014, Month: 08, Day:
Supplied date "17/08/2014"

and then all the way down the bottom:

Datetype D
Enddate 24/08/2014

These don't seem to tally up..? Is that supposed to be a "week" date or date range? Or is it that the Atlas can't handle week dates and it's been interpreted as day date for the purposes of testing?

Datasets shared at capture resolution or not?

2016-12-21T17:18:38Z

Is there any easy/obvious way to tell if a dataset shared on the Atlas is shared at capture resolution? If there is I'm struggling to find it. Or is this dependent on the data partner explicitly stating this in their metadata? Can a user viewing records see that this data is 'blurry' data? In my opinion this need to be made very obvious to users otherwise how will someone know that more detailed information exists should they need to access it, and that they can approach the data provider for that information?

The romantic open data ideal is all well and good, but for the foreseeable future there will be a lot of data shared on the Atlases which have been blurred by the data provider.

Would be interested to know if there are any plans to clarify this.

MARK

Update on NBN Gateway and NBN Atlas with key dates

2016-12-20T17:18:16Z

Dear NBN Data Partners,

At the NBN Conference 2016 it was announced that the NBN Gateway will permanently close on 31st March 2017; the NBN Atlas will supersede the NBN Gateway and will be live from 1st April 2017.

In order to allow time for datasets to be transferred from the NBN Gateway to the NBN Atlas ready for 1st April 2017 (where Data Partners have agreed to this), the deadline for data submissions to the NBN Gateway is Tuesday 28th February 2017. Unfortunately, any datasets submitted to the NBN Gateway after this date will not be accepted. All subsequent datasets for inclusion in the NBN Atlas will need to be submitted directly to the NBN Atlas (further information on this process will be available soon).

As we have already communicated to data partners, the transfer of datasets from the NBN Gateway to the NBN Atlas requires official approval in the form of a Data Partner Agreement. Thank you to everyone who has already returned their Agreements. The official deadline for the return of these has now passed, but we do still need to receive them from you. If there are any remaining Data Partner Agreements to be submitted then please do so before 28th February 2017 in line with the final submission date for the NBN Gateway. After this date, datasets will need to be submitted directly to the NBN Atlas, along with the accompanying Data Partner Agreement. The Agreements have been sent to your dataset administrator for the NBN Gateway, so please check with them if you haven’t received it for action.

The last submission of data from the NBN Gateway to GBIF took place in December 2016. There will therefore be no further submissions of data from the NBN Gateway to GBIF; all future data submissions will be run from the NBN Atlas.

Further information regarding the transition from the NBN Gateway to the NBN Atlas for NBN Data Partners will be made available in due course.

Key dates at a glance
* 28 February 2017 - deadline for data submissions to the NBN Gateway
* 28 February 2017 - absolute deadline for return of Data Partner Agreements
* 31st March 2017 - NBN Gateway will close
* 1st April 2017 - NBN Atlas goes live

Thank you for your ongoing support with this major change to how we share our biodiversity data. If you have any questions please do get in touch with the NBN Secretariat at support@nbn.org.uk

Kind regards,
JNCC and NBN Secretariat

For further details on the NBN Atlas, please see https://nbn.org.uk/about-us/where-we-are/ and https://nbn.org.uk/blogs/atlas-blog/nbn … ss-update/

Fox

2016-12-12T09:25:50Z

Hi - just another query about apparently basic omissions relating to the search function in Atlas of Living Scotland. If I type "Fox" or "Red Fox" into the search boxes, I can't get to information about this species. I can only get to it if I know it's Vulpes vulpes, or one of 10 Gaelic (?) names. Sorting some of these issues relating to common names of common species does seem pretty fundamental for gaining public acceptance of the project?

Cheers

Andy

Listing multiple data partners for a dataset

2016-12-09T13:52:19Z

All the datasets that BRC will supply to the Atlas (Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, England) will be on behalf of National Recording Schemes. Is there a way for the Atlas (data partner pages, resources etc) to reflect this to users - important to giving appropriate attribution for datasets. The NBN Gateway had the concept of 'contributors' to provide this functionality.

thanks
David

Mapping of species at different resolutions

2016-12-07T14:08:56Z

I welcome recent developments which have improved integration of OS grids in the new atlas interface. The addition of the variable grid size and responsive resolution is a big help. However it still appears that there are still some rather fundamental limitations compared with the NBN gateway interactive maps.

The other day I wanted to see a map of a species at tetrad resolution.

If I set 'variable grid size' and zoom to the area I want to see I will see a range of resolutions of records with finer resolutions becoming visible as I zoom in.

If I set 'responsive resolution' I could see the species mapped as 2km squares but only when viewed at a scale of the atlas's choosing - if i zoomed in our out I would see 1km squares or 10km squares.

There is no way to see a map of records at tetrad resolution if the area I'm looking at doesn't happen to coincide with the atlas's chosen scale.

There is an option to show '10km only' - would it not be possible to allow users to choose to display 2km only or 1km only? This can be done on the old interactive gateway map and would seem to be a useful (if not essential?) feature to have.

MARK

Spatial analysis - are all records analysed as points?

2016-12-06T17:19:15Z

Could I ask if someone from NBN can confirm that when using the analysis tools all records are interrogated as point sources? If so I think users should be made aware of this as it has very significant implications on the outputs derived from these queries.

From my very brief exploration I think that when you interrogate records using the analysis tools, 10km records are treated as being a point source in the centre of the 10km square. So, if your search area includes the centre of a 10km square, you get the records for that square, but if it doesn't then these are omitted from the results. And the same would presumably apply to finer scale records too. To me this seems like a significant shortcoming of the analysis tools. Or have I misunderstood?

(I assume this analysis of point data is also why when you view a species account you see such meaningless habitat data as per Andy Musgrove's previous comments regarding Great Northern Diver being shown as a species of improved grassland).

If my above assumptions are correct, can I ask what plans there are to develop the spatial analysis tools to treat records more correctly as polygons? Some progress has been made on displaying records as polygons, but it would be good to know if there are plans to similarly adapt the analysis tools; it would perhaps give some peace of mind to those of us of that are concerned about such things. If we know that the NBN is aware of these shortcomings (and indeed recognise that these are actual shortcomings), and that NBN have future plans to deal with them, that may help to allay fears/misgivings that some users may have about the new system (myself included).

We have often been told that ALS will do so much more than the old gateway - which I'm sure it will. However if it is seen to doing what it does incorrectly or continues to present meaningless and innacurate data (such as misrepresenting species habitat preferences) then it will always be difficult to engender confidence in what the new system does.

My worry (it has been so for some time) is that we have adopted a system which is built around point source data rather than building one that exploits the benefits (and accounts for any disbenefits) of recording using our OS national grid system. I hope in doing so we don't end up spending large amounts of time and money adapting the site to deal with our grid system only to end up with something that doesn't ever quite meet our needs.

MARK

More on that New bird dataset on ALS

2016-11-15T10:44:03Z

I was just having a look at the BTOs new dataset on ALS and on the dataset page I can see that it has a whopping 13,064,724 records. I think Wow! that's amazing so I click on that number to look at them on the map. But then I see: 1,150,540 results for Data resource: Birdtrack.

I assume that's because it's restricting to Scotland.

If I was a user in Scotland I would probably have ALS as my default - how would I know/be able to access the full dataset? To the uninitiated it looks like there is bug in the system that's losing 11,914,184 records.

A better option, from my point of view (and I think Murdo highlighted this in a different form) is to not restrict to Scotland but to have the filters pre-set so that Scotland is 'ticked' but Wales/England aren't. I.e. have a country filter in the filters section.

(or is this all an artifact of not having the overarching atlas to supply the data..?)

New bird dataset on ALS

2016-11-15T09:56:06Z

Hi Dave, thanks for starting to put up some of the dataset BTO provided last year. I thought I'd use this forum to jot down observations as I checked through. First questions:

1. Why does the site fail to work so frequently? Over the last few weeks it seems that on about 50% of occasions, when I type in the search box on the home page, I fail to get any suggested names presented, and then when I hit enter I get "this site can't be reached". I can't find any pattern around when it works and when it doesn't. Any clues?

2. When I did briefly get in, I see the rendering of the records to grid squares is still wrong for Shetland and Orkney (as it was when we had the data on the test site back in the summer). Hopefully a quick fix?

More when I manage to get back in....

Thanks

Andy Musgrove