add measurement type: nitrogen concentration in algal turf or algae

[gastil]

In this dataset: knb-lter-mcr.20 for example, doi:10.6073/pasta/59244d3280854f513fbb07a749c9b6d1 the dried algae sample analysis is reported as C%, H%, N% and C/N Ratio. I looked in ECSO under nitrogen concentration http://purl.dataone.org/odo/ECSO_00001883 but did not find the exact term appropriate for "weight percent of nitrogen in the sample". The "sample" is of turf algae grown on a tile then collected and dried. The term nitrogen concentration in aboveground foliar biomass http://purl.dataone.org/odo/ECSO_00001884 is very close, except, of course, algae is not quite "aboveground foliar". Close though. Could we have a just "foliar", if one can say algae has "leaves"? Or a sibling for algae? I do not know the proper structure. For now, I will tag with just "nitrogen concentration" but you can see how this is not as specific as it could be. Thank you.

A related term: Nitrogen Percentage http://purl.dataone.org/odo/ECSO_00001145 may be applicable. Is that percent by mass or percent by moles? And the child term: nitrogen percentage in leaves http://purl.dataone.org/odo/ECSO_00002897 is closer to N % in algae.

[amoeba]

Thanks @gastil for filing. I think we'd like to continue to expand ECSO in exactly this way but I wanna coordinate with the team here to on how and who will integrate. I'll check back next week and we'll get something figured out.

Also, thanks for reporting the ambiguity in Nitrogen Percentage. That needs to be clarified.

[mpsaloha]

Hi Gastil, Thanks for pointing out these issues. Very much appreciated! Feedback and suggestions such as these make ECSO more useful AND accurate.

Often there are subtle reasons why things are where they are, but in this case, I think you have identified an inconsistency that needs to be corrected, namely "concentration measurement types" should be a subclass of "proportion measurement types", thus placing the "Nitrogen percentage" hierarchy within the "concentration measurement types". I'll work on how to re-arrange this after discussing with the other ECSO curators.

Second-- as to your exact query about how to annotate a measurement of (me paraphrasing a bit, so please correct if wrong)-- "percent of nitrogen biomass by dry weight, in a sample of turf algae"

if the algal sample was obtained "aboveground" (ie in water-column down to substrate), I think use of that term is fine, as there is ample precedent of the term being used to describe biomass harvests in inter- and sub-tidal contexts.

Your using the term "foliar" is a bit dicier, but also potentially acceptable, as the term is used to describe 'leaf-like' algal blades, such as in "foliose red algae" (often to differentiate these from "crustose" growth forms). I'd need to read up more about algal morphological descriptions though, as we might want to specify that "foliar" or "foliose" mean "leaf-like" rather than pertaining just to "leaves" per se, as these are structures of tracheophytes.

However you mention that your sample is of "turf", and "foliar" is not normally used in the context of describing turf species morphology (Sorry if I am describing what is already well known to you). SO it would be a good idea to differentiate the "foliar" and "turf" usages by minting another class something like this:

"percent nitrogen by dry weight in turf algae"

(here, the notion of Sample is implicit as we are annotating a measurement)

then... we have to check that each of these notions-- "turf" , "algae", "dry weight", and "percent nitrogen" are reasonably defined in ECSO, although for many of the fundamental bio- and ecological terms, we would want to re-use them from EnvO or other best-of-class domain ontologies, e.g. whether the "Plant Trait Ontology" has terms for non-vascular "plants". My guess is that the appropriate "algal trait ontology" does not yet exist in any formalized semantic format.

Thanks for the feedback! Let me know if you have any further questions or interest!