Darwin Core spreadsheet for recording
The following spreadsheet template has been devised according to Darwin Core standards. It is capable of recording just about any taxa to a high degree of conformity with those standards. This version contains the European Micropezid and Tanypezid taxa (though it can be readily adapted to record other taxa.) Please use it to record your European occurrences and share the results with this site.
Download Darwin Core template V1 (contains instructions) all you need is Excel and Google Earth.
Ideally there would be a single utility that anyone in Europe can use to collect records and submit them through a system of verifiers and thence on to uploading to GBIF.
As there isn't one, we shall have to make do with an Excel spreadsheet template and Google Earth; and a handful of other utilities will come in handy (e.g. Mendeley) but they are not essential.
Other recording systems
The UK developed both desktop and online systems but they are not suitable for use elsewhere.
Some museums have systems in place for their collections and claim that they are the largest source of species occurrences. Given the figures in the UK, that cannot be the case. Amateur naturalists are clearly the biggest source of species occurrence data. There are barriers to European naturalists making their contributions. This is well illustrated by GBIF's list of participating countries. If you are not on this list then you haven't any internal mechanism for submitting records.
Publishing to GBIF
With the support of this scheme's sponsor (NBN) there is now a publishers page on GBIF. Just a single dataset there to begin with, it was necessary to figure out all the Darwin Core requirements and then collate all the information into a structure which conforms to GBIF's requirements (as well as other needs such as GIS mapping.)
To that end I've assembled three guides, the first two are background information based on experience in uploading UK datasets, the third analyses Darwin Core and constructs a data model which allows spreadsheets to be used to collate data from across Europe. Please treat them as stubs (sensu Wikipedia) they may get updated should anyone take an interest, otherwise they are merely contemporary working notes.
- Introductions: Parts 1 & 2
- European dataset collation using Darwin Core standards
- Sample dataset (from Micropezidae of Czechoslovakia) sic
Sumner D.P. 2020. Biodiversity Data Management 1: Records collection & verification, Dipterists Forum Report, C(6 V2), (Mar 2020)
Sumner D.P. 2020. Biodiversity Data Management 2: Records collation & publishing. Dipterists Forum Report C(7 V1), (Mar 2020)
Sumner D.P. 2020. Biodiversity Data Management 3: Recording in Europe. Dipterists Forum Report C(8 V1), (Apr 2020)
note the above are guides only
Sumner, D.P. 2020. Dipterists Forum Field Week 2018 Occurrence Dataset