occurrenceStatus for basisOfRecord = "PreservedSpecimen"

[rubenpp7]

Hi,

Just came across this one dataset with some occurrences having occurrenceStatus = "absent" while the basisOfRecord = "PreservedSpecimen".

Does it make sense that we document absences for "preserved specimens"? It just seems like we are documenting the lack of data in a collection instead of if a certain (group of) organism(s) occur at a certain space-time unit.

[albenson-usgs]

Looks like no one responded to this. Can you share what dataset this was (I know it was awhile ago that you came across it)? I know that GBIF is also trying to tackle this problem because they put in place as part of their data processing that if individualCount = 0, occurrenceStatus = "absent". I don't think that would be the case for OBIS though because I don't think OBIS has a process to populate occurrenceStatus. But it led to false absences for a lot of specimen records.