Hi Jochen,
I have been testing out the new FBIS interface this morning, and made a few notes of my experience. Sorry if this sounds like a long list of criticisms! But I figured it is best to record every problem I had, even if I managed to resolve some of them after some time. I hope the list below is helpful.
If you use the browser “back” button you lose all the information you were searching on.
The maps are city street maps, which don’t show streams – not much use for searching for freshwater invertebrates! Can the REC or topo map river lines be loaded onto the map?
There are very few instructions as to what kind of information to supply in the “what” field. Obviously organism scientific names work, but can you enter an NZReach number from REC, or animal common names, or physical habitat features (e.g. soft-bottomed streams), or exotic vs. native species? It seems not, but there is no guidance. It would be great to be able to search by keywords other than organism names – e.g. being able to search for invasive plants, or for only records in the NRWQN.
It would be good to have some kind of hierarchical searching, so, for example, you could search “invertebrates” then within that narrow your search to “mayflies” then within that “Deleatidium” then within that “Deleatidium lillii” rather than just having to go directly to your target species. It could be helpful to have separate search boxes for different taxonomic levels, e.g. kingdom, class, order, family, genus, species. Once you have selected one at a high level, there could be dropdown menus to show what options are available at lower levels.
It would be nice to have the results of a search in list form as well as marked on the map
The “where” search option changes the zoom of the map but doesn’t automatically alter the number of results returned. It seems you need to hit the “search” button again after you have typed something in the “where” box and clicked on “locate” – but there is no instruction that this is what you need to do.
The number of search results appears to depend on the extent shown in the map, overriding whatever location is typed in the “where” box. But there is no indication that this is how it works, so you might have a different extent shown to the one you are interested in (e.g. the one you have typed in the “where” box) and not get the results you want.
Some of the search results appear to be incorrect, e.g. I searched for Potamopyrgus pupoides and got 79 results returned. But looking through them, some of them (maybe all) were actually Potamopyrgus antipodarum.
When doing a second or third search, the results of the first search remained on the map while results of subsequent searches were overlaid on them. This gets rather confusing. It would be better for the first results to disappear.
When you click on one of the circles on the map that indicate records found, a box comes up showing a list of all the records. Unfortunately sometimes the top part of the box is hidden and so you cannot access the up-arrow on the scroll bar or the X in the top right hand corner of the box to close it. I discovered that you can bring the whole box into view by panning the map, but it took a long time to discover this.
The orders and common names of freshwater invertebrates seem rather inconsistent – e.g. some mayflies have “(MAYFLIES)” after the species name, some have “(mayfly)” and some have nothing. Whereas in some cases species names are followed by order names, in other cases they are followed by common names. In some cases quite unusual common names are used, e.g. in one record, Olinga is followed by “horny cased caddis”. I have never heard this common name before! This means searching by common names or orders returns quite unpredictable results. If common names and orders are used, their usage should be standardised.
Cheers,
Richard Storey