Charles

As a first foray into XML reporting I've just tried this out and it works fine from the Taxon Dictionary window - and yes, it is useful. It would be nice, if as you propose, one could access the report from a Taxon Occurrence in the Observatiosn window, and also from the Reports menu on the menu bar, entering the taxon name as a parameter.

I'm interested to what controls on which menus an XML report like this occurs. I can see there is the XML attribute "menupath"  to the CustomReport  element. It's set to = "Species Report" in this case. But how does Recorder "know" to only show this report under "Species Reports" in certain contexts?

I see Darwyn Summers is offering some tutorials on XML reports. Is there no other documentation available at the moment?

Cheers

Alan

Bob,

There is a proposed development to search across lists on the Future Developments page - CCN141.  Unfortunately this has not been funded yet.

You are right - designations are attached at a list specific level.  So if you want to see all designations for a species, you need to look for all designations for any of the other instances or synonyms on other lists.

Bob,

It would be a fairly simple change to add a checkbox to the status record to flag it as preferred.  I guess this is something that should be populated by the checklist author rather than the Recorder user - do you agree?  However, could most of this requirement not be covered by using the From and To dates for a status so that old statuses can be labelled as such?

When the fairly recent JNCC Vascular Plant Red Data List was published I wanted to find out whether the designations superseded Nationally Scarce. I spoke to a number of the authors and got different answers according to who I spoke to! I finally got a definitive answer from the editor Christine Cheffings that they are two different types of designation, so some species will continue to be Nationally Scarce even though they have been downgraded in the Red List.

Consequently I think we need to definitively assign designations to designation 'kinds'. The TAXON_DESIGNATION_TYPE table contains a field KIND which potentially could have this role (it isn't used in this way currently e.g. Priority Species are assigned to 'BAP' whereas short, medium & long lists are assigned to 'BioLists'. If designations were assigned to 'kinds' then it would be possible to use date fields (that indicate the period the designation operates between) in the table to assign the preferred designation.

That gets around the issue of changing names of designations, but what about when the same designation system is used but the species status is updated? I think we need to have an additional linked table of the publications that list species statuses. So the date (2005) of the Vascular Plant Red Data List would be used to assign the currently preferred publication source - in 10 years time, following the review of further fieldwork the new publication (assuming the designations are of the same 'kind') would become the preferred source and the statuses assigned to the species in it would become the preferred designations.

What do you think?

Incidentally, I agree with Charles that we do need to have a system that reports both the current preferred designations as well as all the historical designations.

Bob Saville

Bob,

I'm just trying to resolve the different designations on different lists issue and I can't find any taxa for which this occurrs. I've had a look at Plebicula golgus and it doesn't appear to be linked together through the nameserver (there are indeed 5 of them in the dictionary, but they all link via their RECOMMENDED_TAXON_LIST_ITEM_KEY to themselves, rather than to an actual recommended TLI). So, could this be why all of the designations aren't being returned for this taxon?

To test this theory, has anyone else got any taxa that have different designations for different checklists?

Charles