[Nhcoll-l] How does your collection handle sites with multiple habitats sampled?

[Shoobs, Nate]

Hey all,
This one is for those of you who manage “collecting events” as a separate table or group of tables in a relational database, with a one-to-many relationship to collection objects or specimen lots. I’d like to hear some different perspectives on how your collection would handle the following situation:

A jar containing 5 species of 5 species of land snails bears the following collecting data:

“Blue River at Rt. 101 Bridge, 5 mi N of Anywhere, USA. Station BS-2024-100. Crayfish seined from 1-2 ft of water in 1 pass, snails abundant on bank vegetation. B. Smith, 11-April-2024!”

We know these specimens share a locality, collector, date of collection, etc. But the specific habitat is different, and taxonomists focusing on either group (crayfish or snails) might write the locality a bit differently, for example, a crayfish biologist might write “Blue River at…” whereas a terrestrial malacologist might prefer “Along bank of Blue River at…” to indicate more clearly that the specimens were not found in the river itself. Furthermore, the gear type and method of collecting is different (the crayfish were caught in a seine, but the snails were hand-caught on vegetation.)
Would this be one collecting event in your collection, or two? How would you parse the data, and why?

(Assume that both the crayfish and snails are in-scope for your collection, of course.)

In my personal collecting, I have always treated “in” and “out” of the water as different stations even when at the same place, but I don’t want to impose my personal preference on our collection here without seeing what others do.

-Nate
--
[The Ohio State University]
Nathaniel F. Shoobs
Curator of Mollusks
College of Arts & Sciences Dept. of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology
Museum of Biological Diversity, 1315 Kinnear Rd, Columbus, OH 43212
614-688-1342 (Office)
mbd.osu.edu<http://mbd.osu.edu>
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