Hi Karsten,

I have just set up a computer based recording scheme for the BPGS and am in
the process of entering old card records etc. I have just finished an update
of the old record card - it's so much easier for me if people use this. This
was why we had a meeting at the recent AGM to discuss recording and this
stimulated the discussion about what should be recorded re abundance and
time spent at site etc. Your experiment suggests that if a very short time
is spent at a site then novices will find half the number of galls which an
expert would, so wouldn't that make recording the time spent at a site
rather misleading.

At this stage we can't forsee exactly what questions we will want to pose so
we are only guessing at what information has to be recorded and in what
format.

You are right - I have noticed that everyone records old galls persisting on
branches - some record that they are last years and some don't. I'm afraid
people would be put off sending in records if we made too many rules. Re the
public entering records on an interactive website - what about validation
and verification? I heard that the Spring Watch survey of bumblebees turned
out to be a complete waste of time because people were not really able to
identify the species.

>You wrote:
>I heard of MapMate, but I haven't used it, so I don't know what data it can
>deal with. The log scale I suggested would still consist of categories:
>x=1; 1<x<=10; 10<x<=100; 100<x<=1000; lots - it just makes the category
>labels more meaningful. I wouldn't expect people to count 756 galls or so,
>but with a bit of practise one can quickly recognise whether there are 50
>or 500 galls.
>However scale - in time and space - is important if the data from different
>sites are supposed to be comparable. As you said in your message, an
>abundance measure needs to be taken at a common scale, i.e. per location or
>per tree, otherwise you get estimates that are orders of magnitude apart
>and they would be a bit meaningless.
>To have both the number of trees surveyed and the time spend would be great
>- one could take it further and ask about size classes of trees etc, but I
>guess from what you say that would ask a bit much. The time spend would
>probably bee the most important information to know. Presumably there would
>be some correlation between how long people search and the number of trees
>they look at (that could be something one could try experimentally at a
>field meeting?).
>
>We had a little trial one time out in Hungary when we send both cynipid
>experts and novices into a stand of trees and recorded how quickly they
>found the different species of cynipid galls and how many species they
>found. To note the presence/absence of galls it was surprisingly quick. The
>experts often found a complement of common species in ~15 minutes, while
>novices took ~30 minutes. However, after 1h or so both groups had recorded
>pretty much the same set of species. I thought that this was quite quick
>and of course cynipid galls are somewhat more conspicuous and easy to find
>compared to other, more cryptic groups.
>
>Not to record the generation of a cynipid gall, well, I guess that is a
>degree of laziness on the recorders part or they are used to other systems
>that don't have the same sort of life-cycle. However, as long as you have
>the date you can normally tell what generation they were looking at. Having
>said that, I found that some people I worked with had a tendency to also
>record old galls from previous years. As you know some galls can stay on a
>tree for a long time, e.g. the asexual galls of Andricus lignicolus or A.
>kollari. Yet particularly if you want to look at your data in terms of
>abundance and abundance changes, that shouldn't really happen.
>
>Am I guessing correctly that you are involved in getting the card records
>of the BPGS into a digital format? I can see that there are a number of
>pitfalls in the recording through volunteers. At the end the question is
>what quality data you need to answer the questions you want to pose and
>whether the volunteers are willing to sign up to it.
>
>Web-based recording simply refers to interactive websites where people can
>submit their records on the web directly into a database. I use the term
>"simply" very loosely here - I certainly wouldn't be able to put one
>together...
>
>