I am curious why the occurrence records getting published on GBIF by Plazi have “preserved specimen” as their basisOfRecord. Why not “literature”? I look for specimen records based on basisOfRecord = “preserved specimen” and it seems misleading that I have thousands of Plazi taxonomic treatments in …

Perhaps @agosti would like to comment?

I notice that something similar is happening with datasets published by Biodiversity Data Journal . In the data I am using, both the BDJ and the Plazi datasets are checklists, which I also am surprised to find in my occurrence results. It doesn’t necessarily NOT make sense to have checklist records i…

Erica, All occurrences regardless of source dataset class is returned in occurrence searches. I’m not aware of any way of filtering out occurrences from checklists—at least not in a simple search.

The Basis of Record “Literature” was removed from Darwin Core some years ago, although GBIF still supports it. It was originally intended to share details of specimens known only from literature – early natural history books, digitized collector’s notes, field logbooks etc. Otherwise, preserved sp…

Reasons for making basisOfRecord something other than PRESERVED_SPECIMEN for Plazi: These records are machine-generated, generally static & frequently littered with errors The occurrence data record aligns more with the treatment – a published version of record – than it does with the physical spe…

Here’s an example record from Plazi: https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/1303591499 from the paper, Smith-Pardo, Allan H. (2016): Two new species of Neocorynura from Guatemala (Hymenoptera: Halictidae: Augochlorini) with a key to the species known from the country. Zootaxa 4161 (2): 193-206, DOI: http:/…

Hi all, Interesting discussion. I think the decision in TDWG to remove Literature as basis of record was good - given that it was intended to share details of specimens known only from literature rather than literature in general which I think does not really make sense and is confusing. But, given…

I agree with @dshorthouse above, and in particular I want to highlight the importance of differentiating between an occurrence record directly linked to a physical specimen (e.g. one provided by natural history collections) vs. an occurrence record linked to a specimen via an intermediary (e.g. one …

I would just like to add a point of information. “Literature” was never among the list of controlled vocabulary terms for basisOfRecord. TDWG never took any action with respect to the non-standard term. Also, the examples for HumanObservation currently say, “Evidence of an Occurrence taken from fiel…

Hi John, Thanks for correcting me. You must be right that TDWG never took any action with respect to the non-standard term “Literature” as the term in DWC only has a recommended best practice (to use the standard label of one of the Darwin Core classes). I got confused by the message from Matt. How…

basisOfRecord for Plazi datasets

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basisOfRecord for Plazi datasets

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