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NERC Centre for Population Biology

 

GPDD Updates

 
 
 

March 2010

GPDD Version 2.0 is soon to be available for download directly via the web site. This new version enhances the original version 1.0 including the following amendments:

  • Consistent metadata - new columns in the Main table regarding units and sampling,
  • New bounding box columns and accuracy/extent indexes to improve spatial information, 
  • Improved time-series definition - new SeriesStep and Generation columns in the Data table,
  • Erroneous data corrected,
  • Missing data added/removed,
  • 123 additional time-series added.

Note that some data about species (such as body length etc) have been removed as its source could not be verified.  No time series data sets have been removed.

The web site will also be updated to allow more sophisticated searches.

January 2009

The genus for Hake (TaxonID 109) was corrected from "Merliccius" to "Merluccius" in the database.

Rob Anderson.

April 2008

GPDD search was not working for two days from April 16th - April 18th.  Apologies for the loss of service.

Rob Anderson.

October 2007

The GPDD was updated to include the return rates and carrying capacities generated by Richard M. Sibly et al in their October 2007 paper "On the stability of populations of mammals, birds, fish and insects" (Ecology Letters 10 (10), 970–976).  A few data sets with incorrect taxon information were also found and corrected.

Rob Anderson.

June 2007

In June 2007 the Global Population Dynamics Database was rehoused on new servers. This change was necessary to ensure that it would continue to be available and to make GPDD more reliable. It also provided an opportunity to improve the site.  The web site was rewritten and moved to new, more powerful servers, and the online database was moved to a Microsoft SQL Server.

In addition to the server performance, a number of improvements have been made to the web site - it is possible to link directly to a data set and bookmark search pages; metadata about restricted datasets can now be displayed as well as searched; registration information is handled with a username and password so it is possible for you to see and update the registration info you put in; it is no longer necessary for you to go via the registration page in order to return and carry out new searches; searching on biotope now works properly, and I corrected an error in the database that meant some of the datasets in the database were not actually usable because they did not have valid taxon information.

As part of the database move, I restructured the database slightly. (If you have a distribution copy of GPDD, I restructured the biotope table, I changed field names to remove spaces and to make the ID naming consistent, and I removed the redundant DataID - MainID is now the only per-dataset identifier.)  In particular, I switched to using MainID to identify datasets in the database.  The old GPDD site used DataID to identify datasets which duplicated the function of MainID.   Other ID numbers are unchanged.

If you use the web site to access GPDD, the data sets will have different ID numbers on the new site, because the new site shows MainID rather than DataID as the ID number.  If you have a distribution copy of the database, the new ID numbers on the web site correspond to the MAIN table's ID field, rather than its DataID field.  New distribution copies (released from July 2007 onwards) use MainID to identify datasets in the MAIN table, instead of DataID.  The old DataID numbers are retained in MAIN, in the field OldDataID, in case you need to cross-reference the old ID numbers.

Rob Anderson.