Ministry of Environment

Data Quality

Species Inventory Database standards exist so that project information can be successfully loaded into the database. We do not provide quality assurance/quality control of field work. Users of the Species Inventory Database must make their own judgments of data and report reliability using the means available to professional biologists, e.g., reading all available documentation and contacting original authors of reports where questions exist.

We occasionally do internal quality assurance audits of reports and data, however, because we want to understand and report on the reliability of the information contained in the database in a general way. We also occasionally add notes to a project explaining cautions and limitations of data. The lack of such notes does not assure the quality of the work.

It is the data submitter's responsibility to their supporting organization to submit data. We do participate in periodic audits and we provide reports to the agencies indicating which projects have been submitted to us each year.

When we report to supporting organizations, we indicate:

• whether all required components of a project have been submitted (reports and data)
• the loading status of the project (we presently have a data loading backlog so some lower priority projects may not be loaded)
• whether a project dataset was successfully loaded into the database or whether it failed to load because it was non-standard or had errors.