Request - more biological length parameters

[jdpye]

Hello and thanks for maintaining this vocabulary service!

We at OTN are making good use of Standard Length and Length (considering it a synonym for Total Length, but perhaps this should be separately defined) codes for defining the measurement of animals who are tagged and tracked by our research partners, but there are some more measurement types that are being submitted to us and we'd like to have more categories of the form '[Length Type] of biological entity specified elsewhere' to refer to them.

Some of these length codes we have found to date are:

Fork Length, aka Snout-to-Fork, etc. - see https://fishionary.fisheries.org/tag/fork-length/ for a definition Carapace Length and Width Cephalothorax (sometimes CL), Claw, Curved Fork, Eye to Carapace and other cephalopod lengths - see https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Diagram-of-morphometric-measurements-of-crayfish-bodies-CL-cephalothorax-length-mm_fig1_327051539 Girth Pre-Caudal Length - from tip of snout to precaudal pit Post-orbital eye to Hypural Plate / POH Length - a measurement used for salmonids, see http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/fedaidpdfs/frb.1989.02.pdf
wing - there's a wing definition currently but it mentions birds explicitly, this would be for measuring rays, the example in my data system presently is the sicklefin devil ray

My scan of P01 is possibly not complete, but I have made an effort to find the '[length] of biological entity specified elsewhere' values for these in P01 with no luck. There will likely be more strange measurement types that come across my data system, so I'm very excited to relay these via GH and obtain unambiguous reference codes for them!

[jdpye]

For some of the above, the length measurements themselves are now in S06:

https://github.com/nvs-vocabs/S06/issues/14#issuecomment-734350178

[gwemon]

Hello @jdpye thank you for your request. I have now created a discussion area for OBIS-related vocab issues and one of the priority area to discuss was the handling of biometric measurements. On reflection, I think that it might have been a mistake to define e.g. "Length (culmen)" or "Length (wing)" in S06. These were created for OBIS as part of a set of standard biometric measurements, some of which are various conventions for measuring "body length" while some are measurements on well defined isolated body parts (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_measurement#:~:text=as%20the%20cormorants.-,Tarsus,used%20as%20a%20standard%20measure). For the latter, I think that the best approach would have been to define the part of the body that is being measured or weighed in the S25 biological entity vocabualry. This is what we did for a request we received for e.g. Posidonia's leaf length. See: LPO08263

So for carapace width and length we could propose to create the new S25: "biological entity specified elsewhere [Subcomponent: carapace]" and use this new S25 code to create the corresponding P01 for width and length.

Happy to discuss and weigh pros and cons of both approaches. [2021/04/15: removed link to deleted ticket - we have switched to using labels to identify categories of measurements to be discussed]

[jdpye]

Sorry i missed out on this link while it was active, I think. I note that Fork Length is available now.: http://vocab.nerc.ac.uk/collection/P01/current/FL01XX01/ with an associated S06 entry of Length (fork length). I like this result, but if it turns out S25 is preferred we can work with that as well, and I am happy to provide any info on other length types as long as I am able to find it :)

[gwemon]

Fork Length:http://vocab.nerc.ac.uk/collection/P01/current/FL01XX01/ Total Length: http://vocab.nerc.ac.uk/collection/P01/current/TL01XX01/ Second dorsal length: http://vocab.nerc.ac.uk/collection/P01/current/SDL01XX01/ Carapace Length and Width: CAPWID01 created and queued for publication wing length for rays: use SPWLXX01 The code has been remodeled so that S06 Length (wing) is now deprecated and the P01 code uses the S12 definition of "wings"

Let me know if any of the definitions need amended.

for the remainder I am proposing the following: Cephalothorax (sometimes CL) > create new S12 for cephalothorax > combine in a new S25 term > create corresponding length P01 code Claw > as above Curved Fork > as above but with curved defined in S14 and Fork in S12 Girth > use http://vocab.nerc.ac.uk/collection/P01/current/SPGTXX01/ but remodeled with S06='Girth' and remove "Specimen" so that we have a P01 code with the label "Girth of biological entity specified elsewhere" Pre-Caudal Length - from tip of snout to precaudal pit > define in S06 (same as e.g. "Fork length") Post-orbital eye to Hypural Plate / POH Length - a measurement used for salmonids, see http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/fedaidpdfs/frb.1989.02.pdf > define in S06 too

[gwemon]

Actually looking at the document you provided @jdpye about crayfish morphometrics I would slightly modify my suggestions above: new S12 will need to include "chela" (with "claw" as synonym) then I hesitate about the curved fork term: what kind of animals does this refer to?

[jdpye]

Hi Gwen,

Looking very quickly, the Cfl measure is one of the ones on the diagram here: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Diagram-of-morphometric-measurements-of-crayfish-bodies-CL-cephalothorax-length-mm_fig1_327051539 . Not sure i've seen an example in the species reported to me (only a few kinds of crayfish getting acoustically tagged) but was working from the diagram to future proof a bit.