Literature records in MZNA-LIT: primary biodiversity records in environmental assessments in Spain

Data Records

The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 1,263 records.

1 extension data tables also exist. An extension record supplies extra information about a core record. The number of records in each extension data table is illustrated below.

This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.

Versions

The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.

How to cite

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

MZNA (2024). Literature records in MZNA-LIT: primary biodiversity records in environmental assessments in Spain. v1.2. University of Navarra, Museum of Zoology. Occurrence dataset. https://doi.org/10.15470/bvznpy

Rights

Researchers should respect the following rights statement:

The publisher and rights holder of this work is University of Navarra – Department of Environmental Biology. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) License.

GBIF Registration

This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: 3d6fbb6d-8699-4f93-9adc-c1fd6bc03f4e.  University of Navarra – Department of Environmental Biology publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by GBIF Spain.

Keywords

Occurrence; Observation; Environmental Assessment; Protected species; Public archives; Dark Data

Contacts

Geographic Coverage

The data set primarily comprises occurrence records from Peninsular Spain (99.84%). It also includes two other records from the Balearic and Canary Islands.

Taxonomic Coverage

The data set comprises records of 59 species corresponding to five classes, 16 orders, and 23 families. The species correspond to 31 non-Chiroptera threatened species listed in the Spanish Catalogue of Threatened Species (11 endangered and 20 vulnerable) and 28 Chiroptera species (one endangered, 11 vulnerable, and 16 listed in the List of Wild Species under Special Protection Regime).

Temporal Coverage

Project Data

This thesis aims to enhance the efficiency of biodiversity data management to improve conservation efforts. It examines the dark data generated from environmental management-related activities, which often remain misused due to accessibility challenges. By identifying barriers to data flow, assessing data mobilization impacts on national biodiversity understanding, and developing improved data protocols, the project seeks to make critical biodiversity information more accessible and usable. The ultimate goal is to ensure that high-quality biodiversity data is available for informed decision-making and effective conservation planning, following FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).

The personnel involved in the project:

Sampling Methods

We searched environmental Records of Decision (RODs) in the Official State Gazette (https://www.boe.es/) to identify pronouncements with biodiversity data. We processed these reports and automatically detected species citations. Those fieldwork-based records, so-called Primary Biodiversity Records, constitute this published data set.

Method step description:

1. Environmental Records of Decision (RODs) were collected from the Official State Gazette by searching for “evaluación ambiental” in the “Other provisions” database. Using the Octoparse data scraper (Octoparse, n.d.), we extracted the content of these pronouncements as text strings for further analysis. Species citations were automatically detected using RStudio (R Core Team, 2022), considering scientific names, common names, and possible synonyms included in the CEEA and the LESRPE. These species records were manually reviewed and categorized into three types: Primary Biodiversity Record (PBR, based on fieldwork), absence (species not recorded despite fieldwork), and literature-based. PBRs were georeferenced a posteriori using Google Maps (https://www.google.com/maps), calculating their uncertainty following best practice guidelines (Chapman & Wieczorek, 2020; Marcer et al., 2020). The data were incorporated into the MZNA database (Zootron v4.5; Ariño, 1991) and were standardized following the Darwin Core Standard (Darwin Core Maintenance Group, 2023), resulting in a database with 32 fields.

Bibliographic Citations

1. Kohavi, R. & Provost, F. (1998). Glossary of term. Machine Learning, 30: 271‑274. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1017181826899. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1017181826899
2. Fahmy Amin, M. (2022). Confusion Matrix in Binary Classification Problems: A Step-by-Step Tutorial. Journal of Engineering Research, 6(5). https://doi.org/10.21608/erjeng.2022.274526. https://doi.org/10.21608/erjeng.2022.274526
3. Marcer, A., Haston, E., Groom, Q., Ariño, A., Chapman, A., Bakken, T., Braun, P., Dillen, M., Ernst, M., Escobar, A., Fichtmüller, D., Livermore, L., Nicolson, N., Paragamian, K., Paul, D., Pettersson, L., Phillips, S., Plummer, J., Rainer, H., Rey, I., Robertson, T., Röpert, D., Santos, J., Uribe, F., Waller, J., Wieczorek, J. (2020). Quality issues in georeferencing: From physical collections to digital data repositories for ecological research. Diversity and distributions, 27(3): 564‑567. https://doi.org/10.1111/ddi.13208. https://doi.org/10.1111/ddi.13208
4. Octoparse. (n.d.). Web scraping tool & free web crawlers. https://www.octoparse.com/. https://www.octoparse.com/
5. R Core Team. (2022). R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna. URL: https://www.R-project.org. https://www.R-project.org
6. Chapman, A. & Wieczorek, J. (2020). Georeferencing Best Practices. GBIF Secretariat, Copenhagen. https://doi.org/10.15468/doc-gg7h-s853. https://doi.org/10.15468/doc-gg7h-s853
7. Ariño, A. H. (1991). Bibliography of Iberian Polychaetes: a data base. Ophelia, suppl. 5: 647–652. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004629745_068. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004629745_068
8. Darwin Core Maintenance Group (2023) Darwin Core List of Terms. Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG). http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/doc/list/2023-09-18. http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/doc/list/2023-09-18

Additional Metadata