Issue 18800

Some records, (e.g., those from BMSM) show species year, not collection year

18800
Reporter: feedback bot
Assignee: jlegind
Type: Feedback
Summary: Some records, (e.g., those from BMSM) show species year, not collection year
Priority: Critical
Status: Open
Created: 2016-11-04 17:44:30.171
Updated: 2017-04-28 09:45:50.846
        
        
Description: I have noticed that many of the records from  BMSM Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum are reported as occurring in 1758. This, unfortunately, is when those taxa were first published by Linnaeus, not when they were collected. I verified this for a few occurrences from the BMSM's actual online collections database.

The problem is that their database has a separate field for the original author's year simply called "year". I can imagine this has caused some serious confusion.

I can't say what other data suppliers may also present this problem, but I thought it should certainly be mentioned.

*Reporter*: Matthew
*E-mail*: [mailto:matthew.s.bolton@gmail.com]]]>
    
Attachment occ_before_species_published.csv


Author: mdoering@gbif.org
Created: 2016-11-05 13:21:03.377
Updated: 2016-11-05 13:25:48.387
        
For all occurrences I have compared the year collected with the year the name was published.
There are 1.741.933 occurrences that were collected after 1700 and more than 5 years before the name was published.
Attached is a file occ_before_species_published.csv with results grouped by dataset.


Example records from the dataset with the largest number of suspicous records:

 - http://www.gbif.org/occurrence/1319613508
 - http://www.gbif.org/occurrence/1320729112
 - http://www.gbif.org/occurrence/1320067032
 - http://www.gbif.org/occurrence/1317949323
 - http://www.gbif.org/occurrence/1322154183
 - http://www.gbif.org/occurrence/1318399291

    


Author: mdoering@gbif.org
Created: 2016-11-15 09:47:00.851
Updated: 2016-11-15 09:47:00.851
        
Apparently it is not uncommon to describe a species many years after its type was collected. Sometimes even a hundred years.
It would be nice to see some graphs illustrating this, like the statistical distribution of the time gap between collecting and describing.

But even more so how this average time gap has changed over the decades. Did taxonomy get faster?