1 Reply by AndyFoy

  • AndyFoy
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  • Registered: 09-08-2006
  • Posts: 219

Re: Editing Taxon Dictionary Details

I have found what appears to be a bug, or at least an annoying problem that I can't resolve without help.

We are trying to add additional local taxon statuses for a number of species within Hampshire (e.g. local rarities, notables, etc.).  If a new status needs to be assigned to a taxon at the species level, but that taxon also has one or more hybrids as 'child' taxons, then the dictionary won't let you edit the species because of a problem with the ranks.  For example, if I wanted to add a status to "Crataegus mollis" (which doesn't have any rank set but appears as a species), I get an error message because it has a child hybrid "Crataegus x mortensis" which also doesn't have a rank.

The error message I get is ...

"You cannot edit this taxon.  The rank sequence of its parent is equal to or lower than the rank sequence of its children.  Therefore there are no valid ranks that can be selected.  Please correct the rank of the parent and/or children first."

The rank of the parent "Crataegus" is "Genus", but neither the species nor it's hybrid child have any rank specified, nor am I able to select one for the child if I try to edit it first.

Does anyone have any ideas where I am going wrong, or is there a valid reason for this restriction, or is this a bug in Recorder or an error in the dictionary (i.e. should these species/hybrids have a rank)?

Cheers,

Andy Foy
Hampshire Biodiversity Information Centre

Andy Foy
Systems Manager
Greenspace Information for Greater London (GiGL) CIC
www.gigl.org.uk

2 Reply by johnvanbreda

  • johnvanbreda
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  • From: UK
  • Registered: 27-04-2006
  • Posts: 1,237

Re: Editing Taxon Dictionary Details

I can tell you why it happens, but I think perhaps Sarah will need to decide the best approach to fix it. The specification for Recorder included a requirement to prevent you accidentally assigning a rank to a child taxon which was higher than the rank of the parent. For example you should not add a kingdom under a genus. The way this was implemented was to filter the taxon rank combo box to include only those ranks which were between the rank of the parent and the ranks of any children (if they exist), and not including the ranks of the parents and children. The order of ranks is defined by a field called Sequence in the Taxon_Rank table. Because species and species hybrid both have an identical sequence number it means you cannot set up a species hybrid as a child of a species, instead the species hybrid must be set up as a sibling of the species.

Sarah, an easy way to fix this would be to change the Sequence number of a species hybrid rank so that it can exist as a child of species. Alternatively we could change the code to allow identically sequenced ranks to parent each other, but this would allow species to contain species etc which is obviuosly a bit odd!

John van Breda
Biodiverse IT

johnvanbreda's Website

3 Reply by Sarah Shaw

  • Sarah Shaw
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  • Registered: 23-06-2006
  • Posts: 267

Re: Editing Taxon Dictionary Details

Hi John/Andy

I think the former would be preferable - to change the sequence number of a species hybrid rather than to allow identically sequenced ranks to parent each other.

However, I would like to do some more thinking around this and discuss this with Steve and Stuart.

For the moment I'll add this to my list of suggested improvements to the software and we can review it before developing the next version.

Many thanks for your input,

Sarah

Sarah Shaw
Biodiversity Information Assistant
JNCC

Sarah Shaw
Biodiversity Information Assistant
JNCC