New Term - substrate

[crayfish66]

New term

• Submitter: Wojciech Paul ([email protected])
• Efficacy Justification (why is this term necessary?): for many organisms (esp. from Fungi s.l. group) substrate is one of basic parameters describing direct environmental conditions; not to be confused with "habitat", that describes 'wider' environment (as forest, meadow, plant community etc.). Implementing the new term would allow to more efficient filtering data on occurrence conditions, biological demands of taxa, preparing lists of taxa preferring given type of substrate etc. With present practice of placing this data into varied fields (see "Stability justification" below) and mixing it with other types of data within them, makes such actions complicated or even impractical.
• Demand Justification (name at least two organizations that independently need this term): RCIN [Digital Repository of Scientific Institutions, Poland] https://rcin.org.pl/ , (this term has been already introduced there due to its lack in DwC); W. Szafer Institute of Botany, Polish Academy of Sciences https://www.botany.pl (to allow compatibility of the internal collections' databases with external repositories using DwC, e.g. GBIF); probably also other institutions, journals etc. dealing with occurrence data of Fungi (incl. lichens, myxomycetes etc.) wanting to implement open data repositories
• Stability Justification (what concerns are there that this might affect existing implementations?): as the observed usage suggests, these data have been input so far inconsistently into varied fields of '...Remarks' term type, or (in case of parasitism) the substrate taxon have been put into associatedTaxa field; efficient usage of the new term, although not obligatory, would demand transferring this piece of data to the newly created field.
• Implications for dwciri: namespace (does this change affect a dwciri term version)?: To my understanding, none

Proposed attributes of the new term:

• Term name (in lowerCamelCase for properties, UpperCamelCase for classes): dwc:substrate
• Term label (English, not normative): Substrate
• Organized in Class (e.g., Occurrence, Event, Location, Taxon): Occurrence
• Definition of the term (normative): Observed substrate on which the given organism grew.
• Usage comments (recommendations regarding content, etc., not normative): This may or may not imply that the organism influences/takes resources from it (like parasiting, decomposing).
• Examples (not normative): stone, wall, decaying wood, wooden board fence, animal bones
• Refines (identifier of the broader term this term refines; normative):
• Replaces (identifier of the existing term that would be deprecated and replaced by this term; normative): none
• ABCD 2.06 (XPATH of the equivalent term in ABCD or EFG; not normative): none; probably inclusive into http://rs.tdwg.org/abcd/terms/Biotope

Disclaimer: This is my first proposal to the DwC, so please forgive any faults and misunderstandings the above text might suffer of my guilt.

Sincerely,

W. Paul

[tucotuco]

No faults at all. This issue is very well done. Thanks.

[morelanneIF]

Hello, this term has been suggested a year ago. How does it stand today ? Is it planned to be added in the dwc list terms ?

[CecSve]

environmentalMaterial may be a broader term for substrate (i.e. refines, if implemented)

[tucotuco]

Hello, this term has been suggested a year ago. How does it stand today ? Is it planned to be added in the dwc list terms ?

The term will be included in the next public review, which is not yet scheduled. My best guess is that we will be able to initiate the review at the beginning of January.

[dr-shorthair]

Isn't substrate a role of an environmental material?

Substrate = environmental material that underlies something

Genus/differentia pattern

[crayfish66]

Thank you all for the "revitalizing" the issue. As far as I know my colleagues from the mycological (incl. lichenologists and "myxomycologists") universe wait for the term to be implemented (at least those interested in DwC :-) ).
I've looked through the environmentalMaterial discussion from 10 years ago ([https://github.com//issues/40]). As far as I see, in addition to the @dr-shorthair remark, the difference is that this cannot be feasibly vocabularized - the substrate for e.g. lichens, apart from the few general categories (as "rock", "soil", "wood") can be virtually anything, both from inanimate (from my own observations this may be bones, old car tires, bottles, styropor debris...) and animate realm (and here we have to deal with potentially hundreds of thousands of biological taxonomical names). Even types of rocks may be hundreds.

Another issue would be, if we'd want to further differentiate between substrates that are just "a place to live", more or less accidental, or a "purposedly chosen" by a organism, as a source of nutrients, shelter, anchor in an unstable environment etc. But these functions are sometimes hard to tell one from the other. If the 'substrate' term is accepted at all (which is more important), such topics may be looked upon when we see the practical implementation.

[CecSve]

Isn't substrate a role of an environmental material?

Substrate = environmental material that underlies something

Genus/differentia pattern

Yes, I guess. so. My thought was that environmentalMaterial is ideally filled when the substrate is known. But I am not sure the proposed ENVO vocabulary for environmentalMaterial covers all the options highlighted by @crayfish66. If both environmentalMaterial and substrate are implemented, then it might make sense to change the definition of substrate to something along the lines of:

Definition of the term (normative): Observed substrate on which the given organism grew. Please consider registering the environmentalMaterial as well, if the value falls within the controlled values of the ENVO vocabulary](https://ontobee.org/ontology/ENVO?iri=http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/ENVO_00010483).

and vice versa changing the definition for #40 to include substrate.