Intensive Work Session

Potapova, Charles, Lowe, Rushforth, Spaulding, Manoylov, Hamilton, and Morales (remotely) participated in an intensive work session in early December 2010.

The project of creating accurate and complete taxon review pages for the list of the 350 most common taxa from NAWQA samples is well underway. An invitation was extended to contributors, funded by the USGS, to travel to Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (ANSP) for an intensive work session. Using ANSP slides and references, participants started new pages, completed projects "under construction", or both. Participants worked independently or with the assistance of ANSP staff on specific needs for each taxon page. Marina Potapova gave an introduction to the editing system and addressed questions about working with the "back end" of the Diatoms of the United States website. The editing system allows contributors to format a common set of standard taxonomic information for each species. Sarah Spaulding followed up with a later session on specific questions about the system and showing the use statistics. The site continues to grow in the number of visits, nearly doubling from 1000/month in September to 1900/month in December. Thanks to Marina and the ANSP staff for organizing the resources and helping us use them. At the end of the week, several species pages had been initiated, completed, reviewed, and opened for public view.