Hi John, Thank you for your reply. My answers are inline:
> A) Do I correctly understand that these metrics are with respect to an earth environment (as opposed to within a specific animal)? Most of the list can be divided into two groups - 1. ecosystem functions (have an area of land surface as a denominator); 2. plant traits, where the denominator might be 'per plant' or 'per area leaf', or it could be a ratio (mass ratio of element / biomass, ratio of leaf to root, etc). > B) biomass_fraction_of_<some compound> -- it isn't obvious to me what the denominator of the fraction is. Assuming it is always the same thing, perhaps we can specify it in the standard name, as in the mass_concentration_of_x_in_y pattern. I am not sure exactly what your item means, so it will help to understand a bit more. I see the ambiguity. I can change 'biomass fraction' to mass_concentration_of_X_in_biomass > C) How many compounds and plant organs are you dealing with so far, and does this change often? While there are many mass_concentration_of_<some compound> terms, I worry about the addition of large numbers of standard names corresponding to each broad concept. For the CF list folks, this is similar to another item we discussed recently, re taxon identifiers: http://kitt.llnl.gov/trac/ticket/99. (I see this isn't resolved, waiting on me even. Ahem.) 1. Organs: although many exist, we use ~ 5 (stem, leaf, root, wood, storage) 2. Taxonomy: our approach is consistent with using taxon as a dimension. none of the variable names refer to a specific taxon > D) Moving along, then: If there are many (>20, say) compounds or plant organs, is there a specific vocabulary that your community uses to specify <some compound> and <some plant organ>? I think these lists will be < 20, but I will look into an appropriate controlled vocabulary.
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