CalFlora - Occurrence Field List

Calflora provides information on wild California plants for conservation, education, and appreciation.

(see schema for detail and exact field names)

RECORD IDENTIFICATION FIELDS

Purpose: Identify data source and tags used by source to identify this plant occurrence observation, assign unique ID within CalFlora system.

1. Name of source data set and name of source person or institution

2. ID assigned to this record in the source data set if any (e.g. herbarium specimen accession number)

3. Additional ID data from source regarding subsets within the data set, e.g. plot ID number, State Park name.

4. sequence number in data set as received from source

5. CalFlora-occ record ID, assigned by us for use in our system

6. Date this record was added to the CalFlora system (or last updated)

ORIGINAL DATA FIELDS

Purpose: capture core data about the plant occurrence observation exactly as received from source

1. Name or name code (several fields, depending on name form or code system used)

2. Date

3. Location and location description (separate fields for precise locations and text string data)

4. County

5. Elevation

6. Habitat description

7. Collector, observer, or species list author

STANDARDIZATION PARAMETER FIELDS

Purpose: capture information supplied by the source needed here for standardizing name, date, and location data

1. Nomenclature era, used in interpretation of original name, values currently include:

pre-Munz

Munz

Jepson Manual

2. Original location form, values include:

Legal (Township Range Section)

UTM10

UTM11

Latitude-Longitude decimal

Latitude-Longitude minutes

Named place

Text string description

3. Original elevation form, values include:

feet

meters

OBSERVATION DATABASE INTERPRETATION PARAMETER FIELDS

Purpose: capture information supplied by the source needed by end users for data selection and interpretation.

1. Plant ID documentation type, values include:

Specimen (record concerns an extant specimen, ID could theoretically be verified by user)

Documented (source supplied evidence of expert confirmation on-site or of vouchers)

Reported (no specific evidence that plant ID was confirmed by an expert)

Literature (secondarily compiled records of plant ranges published in botanical literature sources such as a floras or taxonomic treatments of individual species)

2. Precision of original location datum, expressed as area in hectares of the place indicated by the location datum provided by source. This is not to be confused with the accuracy of location datum [see discussion here]. At present we do not attempt interpretation of text string location descriptions into georeferenced coordinates

3. Date precision, values include:

exact day

exact month

exact year

year +-5

year +-10

4. Observation type, values include:

Cumulative checklist (cumulative_arealist) - based on repeated visits to a defined area over a period of years by single or multiple sets of observers (e.g. checklists from The Nature Conservancy).

Survey checklist (onetime_arealist) - based on a single visit or short time period (less than one year) to a defined area over a period of years by a single set of observer(s) (currently no examples in CalFlora).

Species list for plot or transect (plotlist) - Comprehensive and exaustive survey of a particular area, generally associated with a systematic or random sampling scheme. Further details described in metadata text. (e.g. Plot species list from the Forest Service Ecology Program [fsecology])

Incidental observation (formerly undirectedsearch)- individual observations of plants not known to be associated with search of a particular site or search for a particular taxon (e.g. herbarium records from the University and Jepson Herbaria [ucjeps])

Directed search (directedsearch) - observations generally associated with search for the particular taxon (e.g. California Natural Diversity DataBase rare plant records [cnddb])

Secondary Source (secondary_source) - observations compiled secondarily from other sources, usually with critical review by the compiler. (e.g. National Plants Data Center: California County Occurrence Information from Botanical Literature [caco]).

5. Area size, hectares (if observation is from a named-place checklist)

6. Plot size, hectares (if observation is from a plot species list)

7. Additional Habitat data available (informs user of additional data associated with the occurrence observation that may be available from the source)

STANDARDIZED LOCATION AND DATE FIELDS

Purpose: present core occurrence data in common, useful format.

1. Latitude and longitude (calculated from original data, not displayed for rare plants)

2. UTM10 x and y (calculated from original data, not displayed for rare plants)

3. County (standard three-letter code)

4. Elevation (meters)

5. Date (yyyy-mm-dd)

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