International Elements
Recorder is actively used by Local Record Centres, National
Recording Schemes and individuals throughout the UK and
increasingly within Europe, particularly in Luxembourg and
Germany. The Musée national d'histoire naturelle du
Luxembourg (Natural History Museum in Luxembourg) developed the
Collections Module in 2003
to integrate the management of its specimen collections with
observational data. In Germany the Zentrum für
Biodokumentation (ZfB, Centre for Biological Documentation) and
Bundesamt für Naturschutz (BfN, T
he Federal Agency for Nature
Conservation) have developed
Recorder-D, a German version of
Recorder which is used in FloraWeb; a powerful web-based tool which
provides access to 15 million vascular plant records
in Germany. Delegates from both countries sit on the Recorder
Steering Group and also contribute directly to the development of
Recorder by funding enhancements to core Recorder which benefit all
users.
Collections module
The Collections
Module is a suite of addins developed by the Musée national
d'histoire naturelle du Luxembourg in 2003 in conjunction with
Dorset Software and Charles Copp The module
effectively converts Recorder into a comprehensive system for
maintaining records of natural history museum collections. It
enables the recording of species and habitat observations as
well as observations of geology, palaeontology and any other
required domain such as specimen, collection, storage,
accessions and movements. To support this, a powerful Thesaurus
tool allows multiple taxonomies and thesauri from any scientific
domain to be maintained and interrelated. The Thesaurus is
essentially a repository of terms and their relationships used
throughout the Collections Module. It provides terms in
domains such as Fossil Taxi, Soil Types, Rock Types, as well as
lists linked to specific controls in the application. The
Recorder/Collections Module combination uniquely provides a single
database platform for both field based observation data and
collections data. Drill through from any specimen to view the field
event information, the sample, the field recorders, the survey
and locality information and much more.
The main components of the Collection Module are:
Additional functionality within the Collections Module
includes a range of additional types of
occurrence in the observation hierarchy, the use of multiple
base maps, a set of customised standard reports, enhancements to
the detail of the related data of organisations and individuals and
a specimen finder which allows users to build queries to locate
specimens in the collection.
Recorder-D
Recorder-D was developed in
Germany between
2006 to 2009 by the Zentrum für
Biodokumentation
des Saarlandes (ZfB,
C
entre for Bio-documentation) and Bundesamt für
Naturschutz (BfN, T
he Federal Agency for Nature
Conservation). It was adapted from Recorder 6 by translating
the user interface into German, implementing a spatial
reference addin where all German base map projections
and
mapping grids are supported and by
replacing specific taxonomic and geographical reference lists
and termlists.
Recorder is in Germany mainly used by floristic and faunistic
volunteer recorders.
The German floristic database holds distribution
data from floristic surveys carried out since 1950: roughly 15
million records of plant observations. Most of this data has been
entered using a software program developed and freely distributed
from 1990 – 2000 called FlorEin. Recorder was chosen to replace
this DOS-based software for a range of reasons including its
functionality, comprehensive data exchange including the
transport of metatdata and intellectual property rights, open and
well-documented data model and the large numbers of
users and an active support forum.
Recorder-D is supported by a helpdesk within ZfB and through a
forum similar to the NBN Forum, hosted by the
Recorder-D site. This is a
forum in German with similar functions to the NBN Forum for
English speaking users with announcements and questions about
Recorder D.
German floristic data held in Recorder-D often feeds
into
FloraWeb, a digital web flora of
vascular plants and vegetation types in Germany which is freely
accessible over the internet (in German). FloraWeb incorporates a
number of different functions: it serves as a data warehouse,
dynamically produces webpages with information on plants and
vegetation and provides evaluation tools for interactively querying
data and displaying results in webpages and web-mapping tools. The
most powerful evaluation tool in FloraWeb is FloraMap, a web
mapping tool which can be used for displaying the distribution of
single species or for any group of species that is fed into the
tool. The map content is dynamically generated from the
distribution database at runtime, so the maps are always as
up-to-date as the database. Besides displaying distribution data,
FloraMap can also be used for data entry of new plant
observations.