Definition of "Environmental Sample"

[gdadade]

Field	Value
Term	Environmental Sample
Definition	A material sample dedicated to multiple taxa that (i) represents taxonomic biodiversity from across the tree of life (e.g. blood, gut), (ii) represents abiotic substrate or environment (e.g. soil, water, ice core) or (iii) an assemblage of both
Examples	blood, gut, soil, water, sediment
Reference	Droege,G. et al. (2016), https://doi.org/10.1093/database/baw125
DwC:materialSample	Environmental Sample
ABCD:KindOfUnit	Environmental Sample
GGBN:materialSampleType	Environmental Sample
Comment	Examples in DwC are more equal to what in terms of GGBN is preparationType; the GGBN term "materialSampleType" has been developed to work with DwC as ABCD already has an appropriate term so not needed there but "KindOfUnit" is not used by DwC; GGBN developed a preparation vocabulary including date, person, method, materials and type of preparation, hence the more precise term "preparationType";

[gdadade]

What would be an example of a mixture of biotic and abiotic eSample?

[yliu-atwork]

What would be an example of a mixture of biotic and abiotic eSample?

My 2 cents: say you get a soil sample to analyze the microbial community. The microbes in the soil are biotic while characteristics of the soil (grain size for example) are abiotic.

[gdadade]

Good example why we need clear definitions ☺

In my understanding this would be an abiotic environmental sample, because the environment is not an organism.

In comparison a biotic environmental sample would be the gut of an animal, because the environment is biotic (an organism).

But it might also be, that abiotic and biotic as terms just don’t work very well in this context.

[Eveltjen]

Not sure if I can still comment and I hope I'm not repeating something said earlier or open old wounds:

I think the problem with the concept of environmental sample versus tissue sample is that the intent of the next step = the DNA extraction determines how biotic material samples should be categorized; and this can still change if people do a new DNA extraction from that biotic material when the sample is reused for other research than that of its original sampling purpose.

For example: a leaf sample can serve as a 'tissue sample' if interested in the plant DNA, but can be an 'environmental sample' if the intent is to study the microbial community on/in that leaf.

So perhaps this is an artificial split and we should skip immediately to the next split: 1/material sample; 1.1/ biotic (blood, faeces, muscle, hair, leaf, root, wingclip, swab, ...) vs 1.2/abiotic (soil, water, air, ice, ...)?

[gdadade]

Comments are always welcome! Also we haven't started working on the definitions yet.

You are right, every biotic material is also an environmental sample. The decision how to call it will be made by the sample owners/curators. It's similiar to very small frozen whole organisms, like insects. Some call them specimens, others prefer to call them samples.

All of this will part of the discussion, e.g. are there any recommendations for curators how they should use the term "environmental sample". I think the discussion about the different kinds of environments will help us to come up with a definition of what an "environmental sample" is.