Jeff,

I have just downloaded and installed the latest version of the Clements World list, and I decided to have a quick look at my world life list to see how some of the Family groupings have changed.  This reminded me of an annoying problem that first appeared I think with the latest version (I have 3.6.49), but it might have appeared earlier. 

I have my World Life list (and other reports) set up to use the Report Columns Family Desc (with Group By checked and Sum Sightings), Common Name, Sighting (Date) and Location.  For the North and South America lists most of the English Family Descriptions are filled in, but if you look at the World list the Family Name is missing for many of the Asian and Australian Families. 

I changed Report Column to Family (with Group By still checked) and all the Latin Family Names appear above the list of birds in each Family.  I suspect that either the English Family names are missing in places or that there is a glitch in the correspondence between Family and Family Desc in the report generation. 

Let me know if you would like me to send screen captures or report pages. 

Thanks,

Mark

Hi Mark,

Known issue. When BD was re-invented at version 3.0, a lot of things were not foreseen, such as, how to keep the English family descriptions updated from release to release. About 10% of the family descriptions are, after several releases and updates to the World taxonomic list, missing because there was no mechanism in the taxonomic release process for updating those descriptions.

This has been fixed in the next release, v3.7.

In the meantime, you can make these updates manually. In the Tax Viewer, pull up the taxonomy you use for your world list or which ever list has gaps; locate the family with the missing description, right-click on it and choose "Edit Description".  Do that for the 20-30 gaps and you will have corrected the problem for the current version of the taxonomic list.

Let me know if I can assist further.

Jeff

Hi Mark,

The Edit Description does work. But in order to see it in the Taxonomy Viewer while editing, you will have to reload the tax list. So, go ahead and make all of your changes, then reload the tax list and you will see that your edits worked.

Let me know please,

Jeff

Hi Mark,

Not sure what you mean by that question.

Jeff

Groups are currently in use only as part of the common name for the subspecies, for example, in "Horned Lark (Eastern dark) praticola" - the Group name is "Eastern dark"

Hi Mark,

Oh -that "Groups" thing. It is implemented as Steve says above. However, not currently such that you can create a sighting for a group (e.g. Oregon Junco, which consists of several recognized subspecies).

In thinking about that, you can certainly implement that yourself within BD.

• Create Things for each group you want to be able to assign sightings to. Let's use the example of "Oregon Junco".
• Assign it to a tax list, giving it a preferred common name and I guess I would assign it a subspecific name of something unique, such as oregonusgroupii. Now you can assign sightings to this thing.

What's good and bad about this and how BD currently works:

• It creates extra virtual subspecies within the tax list under the specified species. Kind of weird.
• Sightings against such new things will count correctly and add up for life list counts etc. Goodness.
• You can always go back and edit such sightings and assign them to the exact subspecies if at some point in the future you can now ID it to subspecies. So - can always change your mind.
• The sightings can be reported on just like any other sighting. That is good.

So, I see very little downside to doing this. What do others thing?

Jeff

My first thought is, "What do I lose when I install and move to the next version of Clements as released by BD?"

Since it will/may not recognize these taxa, will my sightings disappear?

In another thread we were discussing sub-families.

"Groups" are logically either sub-species (but that name is already taken) or super-subspecies - but how should they be handled?

If you make such changes to your taxonomic list, then you must make sure to copy those changes to the annual updates to those lists. Easiest done using the Taxonomy Copy feature in BD.

fyi