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:
http://www.iucnredlist.org/technical-documents/classification-schemes/habita... http://www.iucnredlist.org/technical-documents/classification-schemes/habitats-classification-scheme-ver3 http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/wetlands/classwet/referenc.htm http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/wetlands/classwet/referenc.htm http://www.ecosystems.ws/ecosystem_classification_systems.htm
http://www.ecosystems.ws/ecosystem_classification_systems.htmBob 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
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