Here are some notes onbuilding our new county distribution database

1. I imagine an Excel spreadsheet which can later be ported to Access.
Only the fist four fields would be required.

• Taxon_of_record
• Source_taxon_of_record (report here if a different name was used in the source)
• State_&_County
• Record_reference (Source of information on occurrence)
• Observation_date (when was the plant seen in the wild)
• Validity of record (1-5, where 5=absolutely correct, 1=absolutely not; this could refer to whether the plant actually was in the county, or to the name applied to the plant)
• Validity_source (Basis for the validity assessment)
• X (more detailed locationn info where available)
• Y (more detailed locationn info where available)
• Datum (more detailed locationn info where available)
• Place_name (more detailed locationn info where available)
• Collection_home If based on a speciman, museum where located.
• Specimen_identifier Museum specific identifier of the collection.
• Collector
• Notes

2. We will obtain

• The digital Radford maps
• The USDA Plants county checklists, with modern taxonomy, for NC, SC, VA, TN, and GA
• The Heritage program county records for tracked and watrchlist species
• The SC Atlas database
• All digital records already indexed in herbarium databases, particularly UNC, NCSU, & UNCC

3. Process

• We will concert all records to the format in 1 above
• We will initially assume the USDA maps to be pretty good.
• We will identify taxa reported by USDA but which lack records in a state after the above steps (not counting herbarium collection databases). These taxa will be examined by AW who will determine what steps will next be needed.
• Finally AW will scan the entire set of maps for possible errors resultsing from change in taxonomic treatment.