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detaildba_tabledescriptiontaxonobservationwhere_tablenametaxonobservation

VegBank Data Dictionary: Tables

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DB Table Name	taxonObservation
Table	Taxon Observation
Notes	This table contains the author's determination of a taxon and the overall cover of that taxon.
Description	This table stores information about the original identification by the author of the plot and the taxonomic authority used by that author (i.e. a name - citation pair constituting a taxonomic concept). The table also contains a record of cumulative cover (cover across all strata) of the taxon when not divided into strata.
Field DB Field Name Req'd? Data Type Misc Flag List? Definition ID TAXONOBSERVATION_ID no serial PK no Database generated identifier assigned to each unique observation of a taxon in a plot. Observation OBSERVATION_ID required Integer FK no Link to the parent observation event of this taxon observation. Author Plant Name authorPlantName no varchar (255) n/a no The taxon name that the author of the plot used to refer to a taxon observed within the plot. Reference reference_ID no Integer FK no The authority for the taxon that was used by the plot author. If the authority is unknown the author of the plot is the authority. For other than legacy data, this field plus plantName_ID will be sufficient to determine taxonInterpretation.plantConcept_ID. Taxon Inference Area taxonInferenceArea no Float n/a no This is the area in m2 used to infer the presence of a given taxon. Generally this should be equal to observation.taxonInferenceArea, but at times this area may be larger or smaller for a specific taxon. RESERVED VALUE: -1 is used to indicate that no known plot boundaries were used when recording this species on the plot. That is, this species may occur outside the plot area as indicated in the plot and observation tables. Accession Code accessionCode no varchar (100) n/a no Code that uniquely references this record, allowing reference to this record for this version of this database. Better than a primary key, which is automatically generated by a database and not globally unique. VegBank Accession codes are only generated by VegBank, and therefore data integrity can be guaranteed, unlike with a primary key (number).