Description
Hi,
The dietary information is used in many ecological (like food webs) and macroecological (community structures by dietary guilds) and paleontological (teeth vs. diets) studies.
Many scientific papers list animals and their diets. However, these studies are based on different methodologies and the results are reported in many ways. The general idea of these studies is to find out what animals eat and what are the proportions of the diet items. Currently, there is no standard way of reporting/sharing dietary data and I was wondering if the Biological Interactions Data interest group could help with this matter.
Quite often the diet composition data contains information like:
food items, life stages and parts consumed (verbatim and scientific names)
- food item consumed (e.g. termites)
- food item + life stage consumed (e.g. mayfly larvae)
- food item + part consumed (e.g. Leaves of Wild Bitter Yam (Dioscorea Dumetorum))
proportion, share or importance:
- as percentages by volume or frequency (dwc:measurementValue)
- or as a list order from the most consumed to the least important food item (something like ggbn:sequence)
with a measurement method
- observer feeding
- faeces, digestive tract or stomach content
- time spent feeding
the study time (similar to dwc:verbatimEventDate) and sampling effort (dwc:samplingEffort)
- 'between November 1989 and October 1990'
- 'during spring', '3 months'
location of the analysed diet
- 'Poco das Antas Biological Reserve, Brazil' (dwc:verbatimLocality)
with the name of the data source and a possible cited reference in the data source
- dwc:references, dwc:associatedReferences
These are only a few terms that relate to animal diets but I suppose that many dwc terms already could be used.
Would animal diets be one sample case for Biological Interactions?