Welcome to VectorBiTE’s VecDyn Database User and Curator guidelines. This document provides details and instructions on managing the database and web app including usage e.g. querying (extracting data) and adding new data.
What is VecDyn?
VecDyn is a global database for spatially and temporally explicit presence-absence and abundance data. We accept and distribute data for animal and plant disease vectors. Arthropods play a dominant role in natural and human-modified terrestrial ecosystem dynamics. Spatially-explicit arthropod population time-series data are crucial for statistical or mathematical models of these dynamics and assessment of their veterinary, medical, agricultural, and ecological impacts. Such data have been collected world-wide for over a century, but remain scattered and largely inaccessible. In particular, with the ever-present and growing threat of arthropod pests and vectors of infectious diseases, there are numerous historical and ongoing surveillance efforts, but the data are not reported in consistent formats and typically lack sufficient metadata to make reuse and re-analysis possible. Our mission is to collect and standardise vector population data and make it available for the scientific community.
Database Usage
- Abundance data: Tracking populations over time and space
- Presence absence data: Tracking species presence / absence over time and space
- Point location data: Tracking Geo-point locations of where a species was observed at a particular point in time.
Overview of data collection
- What – description of the sample collected – (e.g. species, count)
- When – temporal information about time of collection.
- Where – geographical information about where the collection took place.
- How – operational information about how the collections were made.
- Who – who has responsibility for the collection