Corresponding author: Torsten Dikow (
Academic editor:
Taxonomic revisions contain crucial biodiversity data in the material examined sections for each species. In entomology, material examined lists minimally include the collecting locality, date of collection, and the number of specimens of each collection event. Insect species might be represented in taxonomic revisions by only a single specimen or hundreds to thousands of specimens. Furthermore, revisions of insect genera might treat small genera with few species or include tens to hundreds of species. Summarizing data from such large and complex material examined lists and revisions is cumbersome, time-consuming, and prone to errors. However, providing data on the seasonal incidence, abundance, and collecting period of species is an important way to mobilize primary biodiversity data to understand a species’s occurrence or rarity. Here, we present SpOccSum (Species Occurrence Summary)—a tool to easily obtain metrics of seasonal incidence from specimen occurrence data in taxonomic revisions. SpOccSum is written in Python (
number of specimens per species, number of specimens collected per month, number of unique collection events, as well as earliest, and most recent collecting year of each species.
The results can be exported as graphics or as csv-formatted tables and can easily be included in manuscripts for publication. An example of an early version of the summary produced by SpOccSum can be viewed in Tables
Mike Trizna and Torsten Dikow
Biodiversity_Next 2019
Collection event summary for
Species | # Specimens | # Collection events | Earliest collection | Most recent collection |
---|---|---|---|---|
|
1 | 1 | 2015 | 2015 |
|
17 | 1 | 2017 | 2017 |
|
4 | 3 | 1986 | 1998 |
|
4 | 2 | 1990 | 2002 |
|
9 | 1 | 1936 | 1936 |
|
5 | 3 | 1974 | 2012 |
|
3 | 2 | 1990 | 2008 |
1 | 1 | 1999 | 1999 | |
summary | 44 | 14 | 1936 | 2017 |
Seasonal incidence of
Species | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
- | - | - | - | - | 1 | - | - | - | - | - | - |
|
- | - | 17/1 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
|
- | - | - | - | 4/3 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
|
- | - | - | - | 4/2 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
|
- | - | - | - | 9/1 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
|
- | - | - | - | - | - | - | 5/3 | - | - | - | - |
|
- | - | - | - | 3/2 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
- | - | - | - | 1 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | |
total | - | - | 17/1 | - | 21/9 | 1 | - | 5/3 | - | - | - | - |