In the coming months we, at the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, will be trying to move the data from the Victorian Conservation Seed Bank from the bespoke database in which it is now into our instance of Specify.
Are there any other collections out there who are interested in having Seed Bank data in Specify and would like to think with us about how best to do this?
I don’t know about seed banks, but they may have something in common with DNA repositories if the seeds are consumable (i.e., by germinating them) samples that are extracted from existing collection objects.
Thanks @Plarson, I will be in the field, getting rained on, next week but I will get back into this when I am back.
Hi Niels,
Might be worth checking with @CorinnaP to see if ANH have any seed bank data migrated into Specify. I know they are using the traits table to store a bunch of key/value data so that might be another option?
Cheers Nick
Hello @NielsKlazenga, we at Natural Resources Canada are in the process of incorporating a seed collection into Sp7. I’d like to discuss the mapping you’ve done with your collection and see if you have any advice for us. Thanks!
Hi @Amelie, very happy to combine efforts, but I have not gotten far. I am myself not a seed bank person, but we have a few experts here.
I know what to do about the samples. It is the germination tests that I do not know what to do with.
We let go of data regarding germination tests. I’m still not sure how to process the information about the tree from which the seeds come. We have a lot of data about the trees, such as tree ID, species name, diameter, type of plantation, etc., but I’m not sure if all this information should go into the Collecting event table, Collecting event attribute, or elsewhere. I don’t want to use all the free text fields for the trees (I need them for other information), so I also thought of grouping them under a single field, but this isn’t ideal for queries. All advice is welcome!
We do not have this measurement-or-fact data, or at least do not have the fields for it. Collecting Event Attribute sounds good to me, or, if the plant the seeds are taken from is another Collection Object (as it is in our case), you can use Collection Object Properties and Collection Relationships.