Improve usability of species navigation to locate species listed and their entries on website homepages (Jakavos)

[StephRorke]

• Consider adding an option to drill down using informal groups rather than pure taxonomic groupings, with an option to display common names for groups.
• Consider use of environment (terrestrial / freshwater / marine) groupings for searching, producing lists of species
• If informal groupings are not possible, consider ordering alphabetically and / or increase granularity of taxonomic groups listed.
• Options to download subsets of all the above would be useful

[johnvanbreda]

The hierarchy is now alphabetical.

[johnvanbreda]

@StephRorke we need to think a bit about the exact requirements here.

1. I've had a look at informal names for groups. It's easy enough to add a common name field for the taxonomy terms imported from the Catalogue of Life, but it will be necessary to fill them in manually as they are not imported. This can be done via the edit links at https://dev-ceh-ukotas.pantheonsite.io/admin/structure/taxonomy/manage/catalogue_of_life/overview. I've done this for Annelida, which is set to Segmented worms.
2. On the view which is used to create the hierarchy, I've changed the Phylum level so that it displays the common name if available, else the scientific name is shown. Or, would you prefer to see both names, e.g. Common (scientific)?
3. The problem with the above though is integrating it with Drupal's translation system. Although I can make the Catalogue of Life terms' common name field translatable, when I tried setting it up for Spanish, it appears to be impossible to get the Phyla view (i.e. the top level of the hierarchy) to filter to show Spanish if available, otherwise show English. I can get it to show the Spanish version of the page with translations but it means that all the untranslated terms will be missing - you will be forced to provide a translation for all languages for every term in the taxonomy otherwise the hierarchy won't be complete. So, we need to think about whether it is worth me putting more effort into this so that the hierarchy is translatable with a fallback on English, or not translatable at all, or a third option is that I'll need to do custom queries to build the hierarchy instead of using views (more work but should be able to achieve the required results).
4. Do we want to have some other informal groups like those mentioned above (terrestrial etc)? If so we'll need an additional field so will want to define a list of categories.
5. Download should be via the existing tool, rather than adding one to the browser?

[StephRorke]

@DavidRoy it would be good to have your input here, my feeling at present is that all the above related to group informal names is probably more time than we would want to spend at this point. Now there is an option to export to csv this will make the input task of checking easier and these filtering options would be aimed more at the end user and could probably wait until later in the project. I think it would be useful to allow ourselves the flexibility to add this feature in the future, @johnvanbreda I can't access the taxonomy page linked above, would the informal group need to be supplied once per taxon entry in an overall hierarchy or is it on a per species basis, thinking in terms of whether it needs to be added to the input template or not. I also think it would be worth adding fields to hold environment categories and populate these as we go so we have the flexibility further down the line as it wouldn't be an onerous task at this stage whilst gathering data.

@johnvanbreda I'm not sure I understand point 5 - tool v. browser - I think the download option as it is at the moment is fine, but imagine that we would want to add a download feature to the browser aimed at the end user later in the project.

[johnvanbreda]

@StephRorke I've given you rights to view the taxonomy pages for the Catalogue of Life hierarchy so you can see what I mean - the informal names just need to be applied to the "node" in the hierarchy, e.g. Segmented Worms only needs to be specified once for the Annelid term and the taxa within that branch should be able to pick up the name.

Point 5 was meant as you seem to have worked out - the question being about whether the species browser needs it's own separate tool for downloads.

I'll leave this for now then.