Dear Graham,

I received an almost similar enquiry (relating to Polypodium vulgare agg.) from Bob Saville of Lothian Wildlife Information Centre and my reply to you will be almost identical:

In some ways, your query is actually to do with how to use Recorder, but I hope that I can help clarify the situation - actually your query might be worth posting on the NBN Species Dictionary Forum, as I bet that you won't be the only person faced with this problem.

First thing to say is the checklists in the Species Dictionary that are provided to us by individuals or societies are 'owned' by the providers - that is, my team doesn't tinker with the contents and if you think something is missing from a list, then this should be taken up with the list provider - in the hope that they might incorporate your suggestion in the next version.

Now Alchemilla vulgaris agg. does exist in the Species Dictionary - it actually occurs in the Recorder 3.3 list and in the Biological Records Centre coded checklist. You will also find that many names that users have requested have been put in the 'List of Additional Names'. So the problem for you is how to find whether the name that you want to record against is in the Dictionary and, if it is, in which lists it occurs - this might mean actually querying the underlying database. Once you have located a name, Recorder does provide a means of creating a bespoke list compiled from names found in different lists - this is the Rucksack feature (just double-clicking on a name will add it to a rucksack).

The Species Dictionary can now handle aggregates quite well so if you can let me know what the components of Alchemilla vulgaris agg.  are, I can make sure that they get recorded in the AGGREGATE table.

Regards,

Charles Hussey

NBN Species Dictionary Project Manager (Retired!)

It would be good to get something on this into the next NBN News (copy deadline 13th February).  We could at least open a debate as to what is needed, even if we can't answer all the questions. 

Lynn has also agreed to do a Recorder update, so the two subjects could work very well together. 

Regards,
Mandy

Thanks for the replies. When we get this problem of species missing in preferred lists we do use the Recorder 3 list as a good standby. Often with aggregates the preferred list provides the straight species name so it's a bit frustrating when it doesn't. I think the conduit approach for getting changes from list owners Charles makes a lot of sense. I do agree that the checklists in Recorder are getting too unwieldy and there are strange things in the formatting which means they don't match - especially the molluscs where the Genus name is repeated in brackets.

Charles,

I am unsure as to the exact year but around 2004/05 there was a meeting of the major Recorder users in Peterborough hosted by JNCC - (Stuart Ball, Sally Rankin and Mike Weideli were there along with many others).

At this meeting there was a BIG push for a complete Master List of species complete with full synonymy to replace the extant Recorder-3 list which was felt to be very outdated. It was agreed that this would go ahead BUT in the development of Recorder-6 it was (as I remember) felt that this was likely to be very difficult to manage with there needing to be an aggregation/combination of so may different lists from different providers.  This led, at least in part, to the specification and development of the Name Server rather than a single Master List of species.

I find it interesting, though possibly inevitable, that this subject has recurred and that the call is still for a single Master List of ALL species names (inc. those which are useful to recorders if not strictly specific in their classification (e.g. aggregates (e.g. Taraxacum officinale agg.), and some of the aggregates of moths (e.g. Daggers)).

I am intrigued that you seem to be saying that a 'master list' in some form would now be a possibility - am I correct in my assumption here ? If so, then I will be interested to know how, if at all, the problems which prevented it from happening before have changed in the interim.

Just thought I would let you know a bit of the history as it may suggest who to talk to before too many wheels are re-invented or hoops gone through.

Cheers

Steve  :)

Given the improvements in searching the taxon dictionary in Recorder 6 v6.13 do we need a master list? The addition of the 'Restrict Searches to' box on the Find Taxon dialogue when searching the taxon dictionary itself means that if the list you are looking at doesn't contain the taxon you are searching for, you can easily swap to searching all the preferred lists or doing an unrestricted search. We no longer have the problem of having to know which list to select prior to doing a search. Being able to do partial name searches was another significant improvement. I found these 2 improvements invaluable when I was using the import wizard to import a lot of records for unfamiliar taxa recently although one slight problem is that unrestricted means an unrestricted search across all lists that can be used for data entry not all lists so it is not searching the status lists which we can no longer use for data entry. Partial name searches help get around the problem of the subgenus being included in the name, e.g. 'agab cong' will find Agabus (Acatodes) congener when you have ticked 'Enable partial name search for taxa' on Tools - Options. The remembered matches in the import wizard also means that something like this only has to be matched once in any particular copy of Recorder 6 for all imports done via the wizard.

What advantages do users think there will be to a master list? What problems would it solve? There are problems with sort orders in the taxon dictionary but I believe that these would be best sorted out in the existing lists. I don't think these would be solved by a master list. A lot of these problems would be solved by ensuring that everything was linked through correctly via NameServer and that everything had a recommended sort order that ensured that taxa occur in the correct order when users ask for reports in taxonomic order.

I would be against anything that makes the dictionary any larger than it needs to be particularly if there was any danger of a master list getting out of step with other lists and thereby causing more problems. The database in a newly installed copy of Recorder 6 v6.13 with no user-added data is 1.17 GB and this will get larger with new lists in the taxon dictionary. This already means that the capacity of Recorder 6 running under MSDE is significantly less than Recorder 2002 although this can be overcome by using SQL Server Express.