Guidance on using the Species Designations Spreadsheet.
The downloadable spreadsheet contains several worksheets as
described below.
The 'Master list' is perhaps
the most important of the worksheets and is in effect a
collation of different lists combined into the same data structure,
with each row being distinguished by a unique combination of "Taxa"
and designation. The collection of lists is referred to as the
"species designations" collation.
The term 'designation' refers to any 'badge' given to a species
whether or not it has a legal standing. A taxa with 10
designations will be represented by ten rows on the master list.
Note that the generic term "taxa" is in this context a more
strictly accurate term than "species" because some of the listed
entities are ranked as being either above or below the "species"
level. Follow this link to find out more on How to use the master
list.
You can use this sheet to get a simple taxon list for a given
taxon group and reporting category. The taxon list will be
categorised according to designation.
This is a more compact presentation of the key information in
the master list. Each taxon is shown on a single row, with
different columns for the constituent lists. Please note that taxa
assessed as being "least concern" are not shown in this collation
whereas they are shown in the
master list.
This shows a graphical summary of the number of species
recorded for each taxonomic group.
Complex synonyms
(New worksheet in Dec 2007)
This sheet shows cases where more than one designated taxa
have been amalgamated either by taxonomic revision or by a
systematic naming process into one single recommended current name
on the NBN dictionary. This list could prove useful for
answering questions such as "why is species x no longer on the
master list?". The user should attempt to find the species name in
the column "name as originally designated" in order to obtain the
"current taxon name".
Note that straightforward synonyms (ie those not involving
amalgamations of names) are shown on the sheet "master list" by the
inclusion of an entry in the "designated name" column.