New terms in Darwin Core
Thursday, 22 December 2011
For the first time since its ratification in October 2009, Darwin Core has been revised! But don’t panic: it’s probably not going to affect your data publication. Darwin Core is a community standard, so anyone can submit ideas, suggestions or corrections via the Darwin Core issue tracker (guidelines to do so can be found here). [...]
VASCAN functionalities
Wednesday, 16 November 2011
This post is also available in French. Our Database of a vascular plants of Canada (VASCAN) is a bit over a year old now (launched on October 22, 2010) and the response has been great so far! The site is averaging 1,850 visits / 20,500 page views a month from over a 100 countries, and [...]
Counting all specimens at the Marie-Victorin Herbarium
Wednesday, 2 November 2011
Last summer, 36 volunteers inventoried all of the 22,000+ vascular plant specimen folders of our Marie-Victorin Herbarium (MT), in preparation of its move to the Université de Montréal Biodiversity Centre. I gave a talk about the process, results and potential two weeks ago at the TDWG 2011 Annual Conference in New Orleans: You can read [...]
Opening a Darwin Core Archive with Excel
Friday, 26 August 2011
One of the editors of VASCAN asked me for an Excel file with all the vernacular names in our database, so she could check them for typos. As the database administrator, I could have exported the names from our MySQL database, but I chose to approach the request from a user’s perspective instead. All VASCAN [...]