1. HUC
2. Ref_Site_No
3. Date*
4. County*
5. Project
6. Waterway
7. Commonloc
8. Road_No
9. River_Basin
10. State*
11. Latitude*
12. Longitude*
13. Collectors
14. Site_Comments
15. Sci_Name
Template
An example excel spreadsheet in the format above can be downloaded from
the FWGSC website.
Notes:
(1) The US Geological Survey has divided all regional water resources into hydrological units, and given each a code number, or "HUC."
(2) Collector's original site number or code. Also useful for
museum catalogue numbers.
(3) mm/dd/yyyy
(4) If on the border of two counties, separate by a slash. Equivalent terms, such as "parish" in Louisiana, may be substituted.
(5) Local project name or funding source (if any).
(6) The name of the lake or stream, if available. If unnamed, this field must be left blank.
(7) Give locality data as in museum record, or if fresh collection, expressed as precisely as possible in conventional terms. No need to be redundant with other fields. For example, suppose a fresh sample came from "Stinking Creek at Route 1 bridge, 2 km W of Dumpton, Godforsaken County, Nevada." Then for field (8), record should read "2 km W of Dumpton."
(8) The route number of the road at the bridge or access where the collection was made. Prefix with US, state, or county abbreviation, if appropriate.
(9) For tributaries, give the name of a larger stream here.
(10) If on the border of two states, separate by a slash. Equivalent terms, such as "province" in Canada, may be substituted.
(11) & (12) - Use decimal degrees. Ideally, all FWGNA records should be plottable. Very few lots as curated in the museums today are associated with map coordinates, but if the locality data (as expressed in conventional terms) are sufficiently precise, such data should be obtainable from USGS maps, or online resources such as Topozone or Google Earth. There's a very helpful shareware program called "GEOLocate" available from Tulane University. Coordinates for collections freshly made for the FWGNA project may be obtained by GPS.
(13) Record collector(s) name in ordinary (first, last) order.
(14) Record anything you'd like to observe about the habitat.