Hi, I’ve just entered an observation for a plant growing on a pavement in a town centre, and struggled a bit over the ‘habitat’ type. I’ve gone for ‘coastal’ but that’s not really accurate and nothing else fitted. Any suggestions? Or who do I approach to discuss the creation of new habitat options?
There’s been some discussion on this. I have had the same problem. The consensus seems to be to put the nearest habitat as your choice but to give more details in the description or with a tag - although Derek doesn’t like a proliferation of tags!
That’s useful to know, although in this case putting the nearest habitat - grassland - would have been misleading. I suppose if the location is right it should be obvious that it’s urban/industrial. But we do have a lot of that habitat round here, so an additional category would have been handy. Never mind!
The discussion arose because a ‘habitat’ entry was made mandatory. It’s pretty essential for any records that end up in ‘formal’ wildlife record collections.
I suspect that the original habitat list was ‘imported’ when iSpot was created - I have seen the same list elsewhere. Updating it would probably cause problems, due to the thousands of older observations made using the current choices.
Part of the problem is/was that quite a few users put up observations with little or no descriptive text. With little other evidence to work with, habitat (however loosely defined) is sometimes an important clue to the ID.
More use of tags has indeed been suggested, but that - as we’ve seen lately with the Insect Week collection - tends to lead to various ‘competing’ versions: this makes collating data very hard.
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Not grumpy me specially but there may be 42 Thousand to choose from already, so it seems unnecessary to create more.
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@EmmaHP There is no Classified Habitat for Urban, which is an oversight.
As for pavement then it is a sub-habitat (two recent iFocuses), Choose the nearest Classified Habitat (Parks and Gardens?) and write in Description that it was in the Town and then add the sub-habitat tag Pavement as it is already in the tag list. Some silly user added Paverment not long ago, please don’t use that
you can check any suitable Tag by opening the Explore Community (Filter)* and typing in pav…
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*https://www.ispotnature.org/communities/uk-and-ireland/view/project/844368/
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I’ll do that, thanks