Font Size:
A New Metadata Checklist For Describing Species Inventory Completeness
Building: Grand Hotel Mediterraneo
Room: Sala dei Continenti
Date: 2013-11-01 09:33 AM – 09:39 AM
Last modified: 2013-10-07
Abstract
Species inventories are one of the most common ways to assess of biodiversity. Such inventories are typically bounded with a defined geographic area, such as a park boundary or other administrative unit. The end result of these inventories is a list of species within that unit. Depending on the intent of the surveyors, such as focal taxa, habitats, or time periods, that list may be more or less complete. An assessment of completeness is an essential but overlooked measure of inventories; if it is properly assessed, completeness provides a means of not only determining species presence, but also absence. Unfortunately, most inventories do not directly measure completeness. However, what is reported with many checklists are enough methodological details that a post-hoc completeness assessment can be performed. We present a community-developed species inventory metadata checklist that captures sufficient descriptions of inventory methodology to make them usable for a retrospective completeness assessment. This inventory metadata checklist includes terms describing taxonomic scope, geographic scope, habitats sampled, temporal scope, and methodologies employed. It is usable for newly completed surveys and for compilations of existing surveys and ad-hoc collected data. In this talk, we will present the checklist, describe how it relates to other efforts and its placement in the framework of the Biological Collections Ontology (BCO), and provide examples of how such data are being captured as part of the Map of Life effort. We close by providing use cases of general importance for the biodiversity research community.