1 Reply by Sara

  • Sara
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  • From: West Lothian
  • Registered: 11-05-2006
  • Posts: 9

Re: Managing Local Status lists

I was wondering if anyone had a solution to managing local status lists with Recorder?

We hold a number of local status lists ( species on LBAP, Lothian Status etc).  We cannot report on these within Recorder as they have to be stored and managed externally - so that means we add these statuses to the data when it comes out of Recorder and we report via our GIS.  So we are limited on using Recorder internal features for reporting and including this information .

Although we could try and bodge things by adding our own statuses as terms and tagging them onto an exisitng lists - this does not make these lists easy to manage or solve the probelm.

Has anyone either got a good solution to this OR has anyone given any thought  to how the Recorder dictionary could allow for the addition of local user defined lists....?

Sara Hawkswell

The Wildlife Information Centre
[i]for Lothians and the Scottish Borders[/i]

2 Reply by charlesroper

  • charlesroper
  • charlesroper
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  • From: Field Studies Council
  • Registered: 26-03-2006
  • Posts: 906

Re: Managing Local Status lists

We store our local statuses in the dictionaries within Recorder. They can be added individually using the dictionary editor against existing taxa, usually in the preferred list for any given taxon. We then have custom reporting tools built with Access by Mike Weideli that make use of these local statuses.

We don't have distinct custom lists; our local designations are spread across the preferred dictionaries.

If you have a whole list of taxa to add local designations to, you could manage this via a rucksack (or a CSV holding the taxon_list_item_keys) and batch updates. Again, Mike Weideli should be able to provide everything you need in regards to this. He's been doing a lot of thinking in this area lately, so it's all fresh in his mind.

In the next version of Recorder, reporting on designations should be generally much improved. That should be the case if JNCC's plans come to fruition, that is. :)

Charles Roper
Digital Development Manager | Field Studies Council
http://www.field-studies-council.org | https://twitter.com/charlesroper | https://twitter.com/fsc_digital

charlesroper's Website

3 Reply by Steve Roe

  • Steve Roe
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  • From: Worcestershire
  • Registered: 22-11-2006
  • Posts: 26

Re: Managing Local Status lists

Sara - there's not been a one-stop solution as far as I know. Reporting on designations was ranked second out of 11 improvements in the recent survey of recorder improvements co-ordinated by Lynn Heeley at JNCC.

In Herefordshire we store our status information within a separate Access db. This includes updates from the JNCC spreadsheets, our local lists, plus regional lists etc.

The prime output is a concatenated 'status citation' field against each species. This field alone is linked (or sometimes imported) into the INDEX_TAXON_NAME for Recorder 2002. The second output of the db is a list of TLIKs of the PREFERRED_NAME. These are used to produce individual rucksacks for query lists or to produce select queries for records for our GIS. There is however a little piece of additional work required in the USABLE_FIELD table to add the 'status citation' field into reporting via Recorder front-end.

Steve

Steve Roe
Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust

4 Reply by davva

  • davva
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  • From: Scotland
  • Registered: 03-11-2008
  • Posts: 55

Re: Managing Local Status lists

I think that what Charles describes is not far off what we do already - i.e. hold the data outwith Recorder....

I can see that by adding the lost status to other lists you can get at them in reports, however - this gives a number of problems:

1. There is no single place for managing your local status list - this has to be done outwith Recorder and then changes made to relevant lists in Recorder - assumably I ought to keep a list of which list I added the designation to!!!

2. What happens when a taxon dictionary update makes a change to teh lsit I have added my local designation to?
3. How do I make this list available to satellite copies of Recorder? - I presumably have to go through each copy adding status to each species individually.
4. This bodge approach seems to be highly prone to errors!!

This seems all very messy and surely most LRCs need a mechanism for doing this.
I've tried to follow the proposals that Lynn has posted in the other topic ( with great difficulty!!) but they don't seem to offer any progress on this issue.  I'm sure that as part of the review of species status management we should have a special list for Local Status for use
.

[color=blue]David Angel[/color]
[color=blue]Data Officer[/color]
[color=blue]The Wildlife Information Centre[/color]

5 Reply by charlesroper

  • charlesroper
  • charlesroper
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  • From: Field Studies Council
  • Registered: 26-03-2006
  • Posts: 906

Re: Managing Local Status lists

Yes, you're right David, there is no really practical model for creating custom checklists/dictionaries in Recorder and the current workarounds are far from ideal.

I would certainly like to see robust custom list creation, editing and management (including import/export) as a priority feature request. There are several issues that need to be resolved surrounding custom list creation (like handling sort order), but these aren't insurmountable. I don't think the changes will make it into this next update, though.

Charles Roper
Digital Development Manager | Field Studies Council
http://www.field-studies-council.org | https://twitter.com/charlesroper | https://twitter.com/fsc_digital

charlesroper's Website