Friday, March 8, 2013

Day 2

Only 46 today. Total 124.

List at http://donegal-wildlife.blogspot.ie/p/1k-challenge.html

Note to Andy (and others, too): Are we recording hybrids? (example: Equisetum x littorale). Willows, Dactyls, Stachys, Geum and Epilobium come to mind....

7 comments:

  1. Personally I'd have said no, but what do others think? I know botanists think of hybrids in rather a different way to birders.

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  2. No for me - record them and include as also rans along with dead stuff, aggregates and 'signs'.

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  3. Its not that simple for plants. Many stable species are of hybrid origin. Spartini townsendii for example. Rule should be 'is it an accepted species'. The BSBI check list would seem like an appropriate standard, though latest checklist from mapmate would be more easily enforcable for those that are more interested in comparing numbers than recording diversity.

    Dead things count according to the rules.

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  4. It's not a big issue...I was just looking for clarification. But I WAS rather keen that my little Salix repens x purpurea x aurita would gain some recognition......;)

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  5. I'm personally using the Natural History Museum Species Dictionary as a standard - this is visible at http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/scientific-resources/biodiversity/uk-biodiversity/uk-species/index.html but I've got the behind the scenes database for work purposes. The Species Dictionary will be sitting behind all pan-species work that BTO is doing (some interesting new projects emerging as the summer progresses...) and also sits behind iRecord and anything else based on Indicia that the BRC is putting together. I'm not sure exactly how close Mapmate is tied in to the NHM-SD?

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  6. I suspect its fairly close as its regularly updated, but I know that many of the latin names for spiders (theridion tinctum vs keijia tincta for example) are not the latest internationally preferred ones. I was under the impression that many pan species listers were using mapmate. I guess that in practice, for counts, most differences are merely synonymy, with splits and lumps from different lists evening out, more or less, so its not a big deal.

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  7. MapMate's species dictionary isn't officially coordinated with anything else that I'm aware of. And it's a pretty piecemeal affair. I manage the MM beetle species dictionary and it's as good as it gets for beetles (I've given a copy to NHM so they can catch up). Likewise Dave Gibbs runs the Diptera species dictionary for MapMate, and there's no flies on Dave!

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