Future features?

Hi, 

Really liking the new site and the integration of individual taxa to Pan-Species Listing. I don't know if it's at all helpful or even possible but I have a few recommendations for improvement/features that I think would help the site grow. 

1) Being able to upload iRecord lists, even if what you were left with were a load of conflicts to sort out manually, it would still be quicker for those transferring old digital data. Or a template excel sheet that we could wrangle our data into, that would then be read perfectly by Pan-Species-Listing and converted to a list. I guess, in a perfect world, Pan-species-listing could grab new list items from records of new species on iRecord automatically if accounts were linked somehow...
 
2) Being able to view or group by smaller taxon groups or subdivisions. I realize this may be a lot of work but it would be amazing to for example look at all shieldbugs or ladybirds and quickly see which ones you have listed with a tick or a green box and which ones you haven't (maybe even a pie chart?). Alternatively, being able to group the list of all taxa in 'batch mode' by phylogeny would be similarly useful. Once you are viewing a smaller group (eg. family, subfamily), it would nice to have the 'rarity' score from the blockers calculation reflected somehow, so you can see which species of a group other people are most likely to have listed.

3) The creative commons images relating to the last taxon added to the site is a nice touch but it would be even better if clicking on an individual species could show you a representative image in the same way. Embedded NBN atlas maps (automatically generated as in FSC Identikit keys) could also be a nice feature. 

As I said, I have no idea about the relative feasibility of implementing any of these ideas but thought feedback might be useful. 
Thanks, 

Ewan

Thanks for this Ewan, glad you're enjoying it. To answer your suggestions...

>1) Being able to upload iRecord lists, even if what you were left with were a load of conflicts to sort out manually, it would still be quicker for those transferring old digital data. Or a template excel sheet that we could wrangle our data into, that would then be read perfectly by Pan-Species-Listing and converted to a list. I guess, in a perfect world, Pan-species-listing could grab new list items from records of new species on iRecord automatically if accounts were linked somehow...

Links between systems are complicated things to build, and way out of our current capacity to take on. The template excel sheet would be much more feasible though yes - we'll give that some thought
 
>2) Being able to view or group by smaller taxon groups or subdivisions. I realize this may be a lot of work but it would be amazing to for example look at all shieldbugs or ladybirds and quickly see which ones you have listed with a tick or a green box and which ones you haven't (maybe even a pie chart?). Alternatively, being able to group the list of all taxa in 'batch mode' by phylogeny would be similarly useful. Once you are viewing a smaller group (eg. family, subfamily), it would nice to have the 'rarity' score from the blockers calculation reflected somehow, so you can see which species of a group other people are most likely to have listed.

Certainly we're keen to do the smaller groups - that's on the shopping list but we've just run out of steam temporarily. Will get back onto this in due course (as keen to see the sawfly rankings personally!)

>3) The creative commons images relating to the last taxon added to the site is a nice touch but it would be even better if clicking on an individual species could show you a representative image in the same way. Embedded NBN atlas maps (automatically generated as in FSC Identikit keys) could also be a nice feature. 

The images are out of our control really - they're just pulled from Flickr. Yes, I guess we could pull them in when you click on a species, but they're not 100% reliable. Not sure this is a top priority. Could do the NBN maps, I guess - note that we already have links to these on the main checklist (see right hand column in  panspecieslisting.com/pan-species-listing-psl-uksi.html )

All good thoughts. No promises, as we're limited in time and energy, but always good to hear suggestions.

Cheers

Andy

Hi Andy, 

 Glad the suggestions are somewhat helpful. I hadn't noticed the link out to NBN atlas, that's perfect to be honest and a better idea than mine of bringing the images or a map up. Maybe it would be nice to have the link on personal lists as well. If possible, a link to the iRecord details page for that taxon would also provide reliable record images and solve that problem? Anyway, these are all just suggestions. Thanks for the all the hard work that must have gone in to getting this site to its current state, much appreciated! 

Ewan

Good morning, having recently found this amazing site I would echo that the facility to be able to upload our lists in csv format would be awesome!  In my professional work I come across sites that provide a template that can then be used to upload the information in an exact format compatible with the site & this would be really useful if it were possible - I have my species list downloaded from iRecord & it is feeling a bit overwhelming to enter these all manually, I shall make a start & do this a few at a time but wanted to echo the value of this feature if it were possible (I'm not very technical but do understand that things aren't as simple as they seem from the front end so completely appreciate that this may not be feasible!)

Great site though, loving the concept & looking forward to being part of the community here!

Hi Lisa

Whilst it would be nice to have a CSV upload it is quite a lot of work to develop well and with limited time we've preferred to spend it on other features. Plus many people have said what an enjoyable job it was going through their own lists and how the PSL website helps tidy them up, fix mistakes, and reminisce! If you have a list already it doesn't take too long using the batch edit option. A template to fill in would help, but with over 75,000 species it could be unwieldly unless we split it by taxon group. Having said all that, direct upload is something we would like to do eventually!

For anyone that needs it, you can This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (Excel/CSV ideally) and we will upload it for them: it's easy for us to match most species quickly, and the rest can be handed back to do manually.

Thanks Mike for the reply, completely understand how many aspects you have to consider & this is already a super site!  Makes sense what people have said about adding their lists!  Thanks for this info, I will email you my list to see if any can be uploaded, if not I will work through it as keen to add my list and loving the community you have here!