How to describe enviroment levels below/over habitat?

[nyctalus-noctula]

Hi all,

I want to focus your attention to habitat descriptor (in Event table). Idea behind it is sound, but after practical workshop on DwC-DP we found that it missing certain level of precision. As you know, in ecology we can specify different "levels" of habitat, i.e. meso-, micro- or macro- ones. In case of smaller organism all of them are in play - and it can be quite important to describe in which type of habitat we meet individual species. For example, we can found slow worm in forest, but it do not convey full information which is that they prefer open, sunny parts of it (for example threw out bituminous waterproofing) which can be described as microhabitat inside previously specified habitat.

Another interesting example is host/parasite interaction - of course, we can describe it in Organism Interaction table, but for endoparasite host is a habitat - and even more, specific part of host is habitat, and it can be very important information where the parasite is located. Same story is with commensal organisms if it lives inside another one (inquilinism). On the other hand, we should not lose information in which habitat host is found...

As partial remedy I propose nesting of habitat descriptor - we can have organism/event in 'habitat A' which is part of bigger 'habitat B' and so on.

Secondly, I suggest to expand 'habitat' term description/examples to facilitate organism-in-organism type of situation.

If you have another ideas or explanations I will be happy to know them too.

[CecSve]

This would not be a solution for the details you propose to capture, but I am a convener of a TG that is looking into adding Realm, Biome and environmentalMaterial (the latter two are submitted as term requests for DwC already): https://github.com/tdwg/dwc-realm-biome-tg.

Perhaps environmentalMaterial could be relevant? Note that a substrate term has also been suggested.

We purposefully opted out of suggesting a controlled (nested) vocabulary for habitat, since it is highly domain, regional and national subjective. I do know @SophiePamerlon is very interested in the idea of controlled values for habitat.