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:
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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