Our current development contract is already bringing in new features and workflow improvements. These will be completed around late March 2022, but it is worth alerting users to what we already have.
- Workflow improvements. These are small tweaks which resolve annoyances. We now have the ability in lists to go back into the position of the list you started off from, rather than being thrown back to the very beginning each time, an annoyance if you have many list entries. Also in samples, the sample name shows up rather than just the Pantheon sample code number. Useful if you forget where you have got to!
- New Quality Indices. Not all up yet, but we have added a few new quality measures. An important one of these is the Wadden Sea (and its numerous name variants) index which tracks saltmarsh fidelity species in your samples. With sea level rise and coastal re-alignment this may well be valuable in tracking invertebrate responses to change. Whilst a trilateral North seaboard index from Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark, it actually contains many UK species and so is useful to us. Hal-1 species show the highest fidelity to saltmarsh, Hal-3 the lowest fidelity.
- Large scale trait analysis. Pantheon, to date, looks at the world from the species in a sample perspective. This new traits work looks at whole Traits in the database and tells you something on their composition. Early days to fully understand the power of this but it starts to allow more strategic & holistic analysis, looking a features and their conservation significance.
- Species Conservation update refresh. We have taken the opportunity in this contract to add the remaining published IUCN status values into Pantheon. This will include the longhorn beetles and the Tachyporine staphylinind beetles. However, we have also decided to add in the late draft stages of the as yet unpublished reviews covering the long-awaited Hymenoptera, the updated butterfly status review, and the large macro-moth review. We consider that the number of changes at publication will be so small that they can be dealt with by editing the Pantheon entries in the database rather than waiting for the next contract to add them in. More on this as and when this all happens.
- Re-naming things. The previous "peatland" label for resources was causing much angst as base-rich dependency species are coded under it. it has now been re-named "acid & sedge peats" to better reflect its broader base status.
We will update progress and new features not listed here when they are more established and coded up.