1 Reply by Rob B

  • Rob B
  • Veteran
  • Offline
  • From: Edinburgh
  • Registered: 08-05-2006
  • Posts: 88

Re: Related/ Associated species

A wee question to ponder over the weekend:

This is a continuation of a thread I started back in Feb. 2004, where I asked how to add associated species to multiple records. That thread (http://www.smartgroups.com/message/view … sageid=311), related directly to lichens where I ended up adapting 'substrate' in Term list editor & including that in the recording card.

I think that the 'proper' way to do it is to make a record, go to Observations & edit related occurences there. I notice that if (as we tend to do), you add an entire survey, then it is impossible to choose which occurence you want if it happened on the same day & location. Besides which, this is extremely time consuming. I know there is an option in the import wizard to include assocated species, but not on a recording card.

At this stage, I'm tempted to bypasss using recording cards altogether & design an excel sheet to be imported directly instead.

The most common families involved are lichens, mosses, ticks etc

So, if anyone else has this kind of dilemma, or even better, a time-efficent workaround, I'd love to hear from them,

Cheers now, Rob.

2 Reply by charles_roper

  • charles_roper
  • Guest

Re: Related/ Associated species

What a coincidence; I was thinking about the same subject today as well. What prompted this thinking is that I hear the British Lichen Society is to start using Recorder 6. If this is the case, then the whole issue of related occurrences will become interesting.

I don't know of any other way to add related occurrences other than the method you outline. I use the drag and drop functionality to speed up the process quite considerably, although it's a bit annoying having the relationship type default to whatever is first in the term list ("agnostic" in my case). However, your idea of bypassing Recorder's input facilities and using the Import Wizard instead is actually a method of input I'm leaning towards more and more. The Import Wizard is so flexible now that it's possible to enter minimal data into a spreadsheet (or Access db or some other format) and import it in a fraction of the time it would take to do it in any other way.

Building on this idea, you could provide customised spreadsheets with lookups (how about a NBN Web Services taxon dictionary lookup?) to make life even easier. We have one volunteer here who can get hundreds of records typed in and imported in about 10 minutes. It's impressive watching him use his customised Excel spreadsheets for his rapid data entry. He doesn't use anything much more complex than a few lookups.

One question to everyone out there: how are you making use of related occurrences? I can't find any way of using them within Recorder. There's no 'expand to include related occurrences' option in the Report Wizard, and there's no way of 'zooming' to a related occurrence within the obs hierarchy. So it seems as if there's no way to tap into potential applications of related occurrences within Recorder, with the only option being to create your own queries (or hope someone makes some XML Reports). Unless anyone knows better?

Charles

3 Reply by johnvanbreda

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

Re: Related/ Associated species

It would be relatively simple to add Report Wizard attributes or create XML reports that display related occurrence information - perhaps Mike or Charles could have a look at this?  You are right though, related occurrences are stored in the data model but there aren't currently any ways to use the data other than browse it.

John van Breda
Biodiverse IT

johnvanbreda's Website