There were a few issues that were discovered.
"Practically speaking, these repeat visits (which should be documented as such) can be treated as multiple visits to the same plot and recorded as one plot observation record. Conversely, multiple visits over a series of years should be treated as separate plot observations (Poore 1962)." This should be included somewhere in the documentation of VegBank, as well as the fact that the larger cover of species observed in both sampling days would be used.
Add to documentation about 3 types of cover:
"3 types of cover. This is clearly articulated. May need to be clarified how these are stored in VegBank, as the pure stratum cover are in actual percent, not part of a cover method,but just raw %."
Also,
"We recommend, but do not require, that a list of additional species found in the stand but outside the plot also be compiled. It is important that species within the plot be distinguished from those outside the plot, in order that diversity estimates for the plot (or area) not be inflated."
We need to document how this is handled in VegBank, namely with a supersample of unknown size (taxonArea = -1).
Do we need a field for Location Source, i.e. how the coordinates were determined (map, GPS, surveying, etc.)?
Ground cover had some issues:
live vascular stem, nonvascular species are in the Standards document but not in VegBank
Carolina Veg Survey has recently completely revampled the ground cover scheme, we may want to adopt theirs, or normalize our model so that we can handle any number of ground cover elements
"spatial units (decimal degrees, meters, etc.), size of the spheroid, central meridian, latitude of projection's origin,"
--none of these are stored in VegBank
An additional field needed as a public reason for the embargo of plots????