Aggregation into Collecting Events

The concept of collecting events, each given a unique event IDs, is critical to how modern ichthyological data are organized and maintained. Many types of data are stored at the event level, excluding information about the specimens themselves. Event level data include things like collectors, locality details, date of collection, collector field notes and images of the location and collectors. Besides facilitating optimal data management, organizing a database of occurrence records into collecting events allows for a deeper understanding of the data, including an estimation of collection effort across the state not otherwise possible. Unfortunately, through the long history of museum specimen data being stored largely outside of relational databases, where records were not often "tied" together by an event identifier, and the non-standardized nature of those data, automatically creating events based on text fields is excessively error prone. However, now that the records have been largely georeferenced and quality controlled, we are able to lump records into events based on coordinates and dates using a simple set of logic. This was completed as part of Version 2 of the website at the same time our track 2 data were released. Track 3 data are also grouped into events, but are not, at the time of this writing, grouped with track 1 or 2 records that were already in the database.

Records were determined to be from the same event when all of the following criteria were met:

• must be georeferenced
• begin and end dates must be the same day
• location coordinates must be matching on the first three decimals