I’m giving myself a bit of leeway at the end of the year to explore something I’ve been thinking about a lot this year: norms, roles, and responsibilities in providing, managing, and analyzing occurrence data. My latest round of exploration has gotten deeply philosophical, so now I’m spending time with the following five papers:

I’ve just read this paper analyzing more than 23,000 decapod crustacean species names written by editors of the DecaNet database. They categorized names following a similar analysis done on spider names in 2023 and added these categories to each species name on DecaNet now, which is a neat detail in addition to all they provide already! I’ve been in a species name database rabbit hole for months now; there’s been so much to learn about the species I get to work with these days, and the information for marine species is really accessible (thanks, WoRMS!), which has made the learning far more approachable and manageable than I thought it would be.