Agree with Bob.

 

I suspect somewhere that ecosystems and habitats should be given fuzzy definitions, instead of trying to establish a non-overlapping partition.

Or at least, the allocation of species to habitats should be fuzzy. But what a work …

 

BW

Nicolas.

 

From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Bob Morris
Sent: Thursday 17 March 2011 13:27
To: Tony.Rees@csiro.au
Cc: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org
Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] FW: Habitat classifications?

 

In my experience, more than in any other subdiscipline of the life sciences, environmental and/or habitat classifications proliferate--and perhaps are difficult to reconcile with one another--for several reasons. However all those reasons seem to be related to the context of the authors, including their primary use cases (e.g. decision support vs. restoration vs. protection vs. environmental impact, ....) and sometimes the organizing community's primary subdiscipline (e.g. ecology vs genomics vs taxonomy vs economic uses vs....). 

 

So in my opinion, besides granularity, it is perhaps wise to consider the point of view of the authors of a classification to see whether it coincides with your purposes. 

 

Some more classifications and references:

 

 

Bob Morris

 

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 11:26 PM, <Tony.Rees@csiro.au> wrote:

Apologies for cross-posting - below is a message I just sent to the TAXACOM list, but if there are TDWG persons not on TAXACOM who have not seen it and may have useful information, I'd be happy to receive it.

Regards - Tony


> -----Original Message-----
> From: taxacom-bounces@mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:taxacom-
> bounces@mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Tony.Rees@csiro.au
> Sent: Thursday, 17 March 2011 2:22 PM
> To: Taxacom@mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> Subject: [ExternalEmail] [Taxacom] Habitat classifications?
>
> Dear all,
>
> I am interested in extending the habitat classification presently used in
> my IRMNG genera and species database from the present "very basic"
> (marine/nonmarine/both) to something a bit more detailed - maybe marine,
> freshwater, terrestrial with up to perhaps a dozen or so subcategories of
> each, as appropriate (e.g. end up with a little nested hierarchy of maybe
> 30-50 terms total).
>
> So, I am looking for suggestions of such classifications as may already be
> in use in order to either pick one up more or less unchanged, or develop
> something with the best features of several. For example I am familiar
> with the following off the top of my head:
>
> http://sn2000.taxonomy.nl/SyntaxHabitat.htm - 23 terms, coverage a bit
> uneven
>
> http://mave.tweakdsl.nl/tn/syntax.html - scroll down to the section headed
> "% HABITAT"   -- 56 terms, looks quite useable.
>
> Something like the EUNIS classification e.g. as accessible via
>
> http://eunis.eea.europa.eu/habitats-code-browser.jsp   possibly gets too
> detailed too quickly at this time for my needs, but you never know what
> may end up being of value.
>
> If list persons can point me at any other resources worth looking at, or
> comment on details of the above, I would be very appreciative. It also
> occurs to me that some people may have been through this exercise
> previously, e.g. for "species / structured descriptive data" purposes, so
> any pointers to the results of those deliberations would also be useful.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Tony Rees
> Manager, Divisional Data Centre,
> CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research,
> GPO Box 1538,
> Hobart, Tasmania 7001, Australia
> Ph: 0362 325318 (Int: +61 362 325318)
> Fax: 0362 325000 (Int: +61 362 325000)
> e-mail: Tony.Rees@csiro.au
> Manager, OBIS Australia regional node, http://www.obis.org.au/
> Biodiversity informatics research activities:
> http://www.cmar.csiro.au/datacentre/biodiversity.htm
> Personal info:
> http://www.fishbase.org/collaborators/collaboratorsummary.cfm?id=1566
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
>
> Taxacom Mailing List
> Taxacom@mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
>
> The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either of
> these methods:
>
> (1) http://taxacom.markmail.org
>
> Or (2) a Google search specified as:
> site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom  your search terms here
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--
Robert A. Morris
Emeritus Professor  of Computer Science
UMASS-Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd
Boston, MA 02125-3390
Associate, Harvard University Herbaria
email: morris.bob@gmail.com
web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/
web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush
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phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile)