Hello,
This is hopefully the correct forum and sub forum to post this in.
Rearing
At present, the standard “Enter a Casual Record” and “Enter a List of Records” are both concerned with records that occur at a single date*.
However, for any specimens that have had to be reared, such as a rearing a specimen to an identifiable life stage, from a substrate sampling or from a host in case of parasitoids, the records will have a wider date range than a single date.
Rearing records may also include temporal information related to life stages, such as the date sampled as egg, date when eggs hatched, period when larval, date of pupation, period as pupa, date of adult emergence.
Additionally specimens that have been obtained with survey methods that run over longer time periods than a single day, i.e Vane Traps, Malaise Traps etc., will also have a date range.
With the exception of some of the species group forms (Moths and any others? The SRS form does not seem to be working, I wasn’t able to check it) to enter records with any duration other than a single day.
Would iRecord then consider adding the functionality to record records with a duration greater than a single day, and when that duration relates to different life stages of the same organism, a way to record this information.
Associated Organisms/Records
In a related point. iRecord appears to have no way to generally* (Species group forms are not currently working for me so I haven’t been able to check if this is available for some species groups, but I think that the Sawflies group dose it but not as associating two records. FRDBI also does this it appears) record where an organism is related in some way to another, e.g. has been reared from a host, feeding on a plant etc.
Would it be possible for iRecord to record such a relationship, ideally in the form of being able to associate two distinct records, so as to be able to benefit from both records being able to be verified by their respective taxon specialists, i.e. if I have encountered a caterpillar feeding on a plant, it should be possible for the Lepidopteran expert to verify that determination and the Botanist to verify the plant.
Species Group Forms
When attempting to access Species Group Forms, I’m frequently getting a response of “The application did not respond in time” and being unable to accesses the form. This appears to be happening more frequently currently than in for the Generalist submit a record forms, but is also happening on these on occasion.
iRecord forum vs GitHub.
When should we be using one or the other? As it appears that in at least some cases forum posts have been directly reproduced onto the GitHub from here, are the situations when we should be originating posts there instead of here, such as bug reports or features requests (which this is in substance).
*Apart from entering this information into the comments box, however this is not standardised or possible to meaningfully integrate and represents a inferior solution to simply using the pre-iRecord submission routes for the relevant recording scheme should the exist.
Thanks terribly,
Kieran