Thank you for your comments about the behaviour of the search facility in the species searching section. They have been added to our overall user feedback sheet.

It is useful to have your suggestions for improvement and we will have to discuss them with the developer. I looked at the 'Cladonia' search and the results come out in 'best match' order but given the listing that results in we should explore how 'best match' is decided upon. There is a drop down menu on the page to change criteria to 'Sort by' to 'scientific name', 'common name' or 'taxon rank' but it does not appear to be working so I have reported it as a bug.

Many thanks again.
Christine

There was no consistency in differentiating between species/ subspecies/variety/ aggregrate e.g. in the list
variety     Cladonia ceranoides tax.vag. infundibulifera
variety     Cladonia chlorophaea var. novochlorophaea
variety     Cladonia crispata f. infundibulifera
species aggregate     Cladonia coccifera f. cornucopioides
species aggregate     Cladonia coccifera var. cornucopioides
species     Cladonia coccifera var. deformis
species     Cladonia coccifera f. asotea
species     Cladonia sylvatica agg.
subspecies    Cladonia cervicornis subsp. verticillata
subspecies    Cladonia sylvatica agg.

Next I tried Cladonia cri - which produced the same 105 Cladonia species.
Next I tried Cladonia crispata, this produced 110 species, some of which were not Cladonia but carried the specific name crispata. I could then filter this to lichens and then had just 61 choices.

OK so lichens might be taxonomically difficult so I tried  Lycopus euro this produced the correct species link  Lycopus europaeus but also 3 localities for Council of Europe Boulevard and 1 for Europe Road.

I won't go through all the other combinations of names either full or abbreviated which I tried, but only rarely did I get a result which enabled me to to either quickly find the species I was looking for or locate it in a list.

I know the taxonomic databases are complex, but why if I search from the species page do I get locations?
Gateway 5 searches in a smilar manner using the binomial as two separate fields, and although it will produce a long list, the nearest match is at the top of the list.

Efficient species searching is key to the use of the system and needs to be robust and produce the expected results.
It would be appreciated if this could be put on the priority list.

Thank you

Christine