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Topic: Presence abundances.

Would you please consider the following change in a future release.

For a few years now, I have been importing records for which there is no abundance count, just presence. The problem being at some point in time I dropped using the phrase 'Present' in the import file Abundance field, for reasons which I cannot recall, and imported data with no abundance data at all i.e. no numerical value, just the lifestage i.e. Adult. As there was no numerical abundance data, I assumed this would be written as 'Present' but to my dismay it has give all the records a value of '1' which is now causing a problem with statistical analysis. I now find in the Help file this is by design!

Surely, if a record has no numerical value attached to it (not a zero-abundance record which is a negative record) but a valid stage this would indicate a presence, not an actual count of '1'. This in my view is quite a dangerous assumption, one I've just fallen foul for which there isn't an easy fix.

Are there any others who have the same problem or am I the only numpty?

Les Evans-Hill
Senior Data Officer, National Moth Recording Scheme

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Re: Presence abundances.

You're not the only one - we have quite a few plants with counts of 1; a little easier to identify than moths in the database I suspect! There's not many places where you get just one plant of yorkshire-fog...

Certainly when (manually) entering records I don't over assume and enter 'adult' as 'present adult' rather than '1 adult'.

Charlie Barnes
Information Officer
Greater Lincolnshire Nature Partnership

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Re: Presence abundances.

Charlie,

Frustrating but not the end of the world, I am currently refreshing about 66% of my surveys so the issues will go away survey-by-survey as work in progress I then need to delete and reimport other surveys I've not had a recent refresh, the whole thing will probably take about a year to get back in sync.

Les Evans-Hill
Senior Data Officer, National Moth Recording Scheme