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

Tue Apr 30 08:39:54 EDT 2024

In our relational database, we would also treat this as two separate collecting events.  We consider a collecting event to be uniquely defined by a combination of the following:

Locality
Habitat
Date
Collecting Method
Collectors

In the example you provided, the crayfish and snails would be separated into separate containers and we assign a unique collecting event number to each event.

Brad

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From: Nhcoll-l <nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu> On Behalf Of Dean Pentcheff
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Subject: Re: [Nhcoll-l] How does your collection handle sites with multiple habitats sampled?

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Just to be pedantic, there's variation in whether databases are constructed with separate location and event tables, or take a unified view towards a location/event. Separate tables are useful in cases where there is repeat sampling at a single location.

But that said... we, too, would likely declare those to be separate events (also separate specimen lots — we'd likely separate them into two containers). In a slightly more debatable decision, we may also create separate "events" when a single sample is split between ethanol and formalin preservative.

-Dean
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On Fri, Apr 12, 2024 at 12:50 AM Tom Schiøtte <tschioette at snm.ku.dk<mailto:tschioette at snm.ku.dk>> wrote:
Hi Nate,

I agree with Brian (and yourself apparently). In our setup collecting gear is part of the event record as is a field for ‘Fresh water/Marine/Terrestrial’. These only give meaning when two events are recorded.

Cheers

Tom

Tom Schiøtte

Collection manager, Echinodermata & Mollusca
Natural History Museum of Denmark (Zoology)
Universitetsparken 15
DK 2100 Copenhagen OE

+45 35 32 10 48
TSchioette at snm.ku.dk<mailto:TSchioette at snm.ku.dk>

From: Nhcoll-l <nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu<mailto:nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu>> On Behalf Of Sidlauskas, Brian
Sent: 12. april 2024 02:15
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Subject: Re: [Nhcoll-l] How does your collection handle sites with multiple habitats sampled?

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Hi Nate,

Figured I’d respond to this one, since I’m asking you for more caliper advice. 😉

This sounds like a case of one locality with two different collecting events.  Even when a team is targeting all the same nominal taxon (e.g., just fishes, or just insects, or whatever) I think the differences in collecting method (trap versus seine versus shocker) are relevant when more than one method is used at a site.  So, I’d record this as two separate collecting events with different associated data in the collection method field.  There might also be differences in fields like depth, start time and end time.  I’d probably record the microhabitat details in a free text field (not the locality description).

Best Fishes,

---- Brian

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From: Nhcoll-l <nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu<mailto:nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu>> on behalf of "Shoobs, Nate" <shoobs.1 at osu.edu<mailto:shoobs.1 at osu.edu>>
Date: Thursday, April 11, 2024 at 6:39 PM
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Subject: [Nhcoll-l] How does your collection handle sites with multiple habitats sampled?

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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
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