PARENT SESSION
Oral Session #84: Statistical Ecology.
Presiding: L. Subhash
Thursday, August 8. 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM. Mesquite Room, Radisson.

Data models for community information.

PEET, ROBERT^*,1, HARRIS, JOHN², WALKER, MARILYN³, JENNINGS, MICHAEL⁴, GROSSMAN, DENNIS⁵, ¹ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill² National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis³ University of Alaska, Fairbanks⁴ USGS Gap Analysis Program⁵ NatureServe

ABSTRACT- Understanding of ecological communities is likely to increase greatly as additional information on taxon co-occurrences becomes available from large data archives. To maximize the availability and utility of such data, ecologists need to accept and conform to standard data structures and exchange formats. The basic data record for documenting an ecological community contains a set of observations about a site and a list of taxa that co-occurred there. We have developed a general data model for co-occurrence records to facilitate archiving and recovery. In addition, databases of organism and community taxa need to be linked. However, taxonomic standards for both organisms and communities vary with time, place, and investigator such that taxa of organisms and communities frequently have multiple names and those same names frequently have been applied to multiple taxon concepts. When we combine diverse data into a single database, we need to reconcile those different standards. The traditional solution of using standardized lists fails to allow effective dataset integration because (1) online lists are periodically updated, thereby presenting a moving target, (2) one name can be used for multiple taxonomic concepts and one concept can be labeled with multiple names, and (3) different parties have different perspectives on acceptable names and the meanings associated with them. We provide a general data model for semantic mediation of types of organisms and communities to complement our taxon co-occurrence data model.

KEY WORDS: ecoinformatics, data models, biological nomenclature, database architecture