Final Report October 2011 for the BBI-Matra/2008/015 ... - Vlindernet

3.4. Progress on the planned activities
1 1 . All Turkish butterfly data available for conservation studies.
1.1. Bring together, scan and convert to Excel all existing data sources, including
the Hesselbarth, van Oorschot and Wagener (1995) data set.
Despite all the challenges the goal was achieved and the data was digitized as planned and
is now available for further analysis. The complete digitized data set is available for
international conservation work since a copy of the complete database has been submitted
to the Ministry of Environment’s online database, Nuh’un Gemisi (Noah’s Ark) as well as for
the butterfly-recording system at BCE.
Details on the work:
Most Turkish butterfly data was gathered, evaluated and organised for the major three
volume work by G. Hesselbarth, H. van Oorschot and S. Wagener, Die Tagfalter der Türkei,
published in 1995. The project’s first major task was to convert this 1,138 pages of
published data to an electronic format which could be analysed and mapped.
Preparatory work:
� Permission was obtained from the publishers to digitise the Hesselbarth et al. (1995)
data;
� Test pages were scanned, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software was tested for
its accuracy – particularly for representation of Turkish characters – and a system for
extracting the text to a standard Excel format via macros was developed with the voluntary
expert support of Neil Thompson (Butterfly Conservation UK).
Later on: Jan-Mar 2009:
� 1,138 pages of the book were scanned and saved as pdfs – work done by a
professional bureau in Ankara;
� The pdfs were converted to text using OCR software, Abbyy FineReader Pro;
� Text pages were extracted to Excel via macros.
Apr 2009-Apr 2010:
� Errors and omissions in the Hesselbarth et al. data set were corrected;
� New records from butterfly watchers were added – sourcing, checking, and data
reformatting;
� A system for including records with only province-level data was developed;
� Data were updated – searches of the scientific literature for recently described species
or changes in taxonomic treatment since the publication of Hesselbarth et al. in 1995,
identifying the records to use, deciding how to map them, extracting, digitising and
identifying the locations.
Extensive manual correction and
completion of data was needed and
many hours (incl. voluntary) were
spent
1 The formulation and the numbering of the main activities follows the one of the project’s budget planning
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