sp codes in full plant list?

[rudeboybert]

Hi @gonzalezeb

I'm currently looking at tree cores data, which includes species codes sp. I'm still learning all the mappings from sp to scientific names, common names, etc. I then found this very helpful full plant list of all plant species. Questions:

1. Would you say that this list acts as a "master" florae species list for all SCBI databases?
2. If so, would you be open to a pull request where I add a fifth column called sp with species code? That way other forest ecology novices could do a quick join with the above list along the key variable sp. No problem if this doesn't fit into your plans.
3. The rule for creating sp codes seems simple enough: take the first two letters of both the genus and specific and paste them together with no space. However I noticed that Carya ovalis is coded as caovl instead of caov. At first I thought it was because more than one species could be coded as caov using the above rule, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Out of curiosity, could you explain why?

Many thanks

[gonzalezeb]

Albert, here your answers:

1. yes, this is the master plant species for the plot but notice that it also include herbaceous/ferns plants. For now, the sp codes only applies for woody species that are part of the census (what we also call "core census").
2. yes, I like that idea actually, but the more plants you have on that list the chances area that a code will repeat. We don't want that to affect our sp codes that have been used for years for analysis, etc. It is better that you use this species list for everything related to the forestgeo tree data at scbi.
3. no answer for that, that code was already given when I started to work at scbi. I never worried to changed, it should remain as it (at least for now).

Hope this help.

[rudeboybert]

Thanks for the info!