lifeStage

The Darwin Core comments about the term lifeStage suggested that when the record refers to more than one individual, their life stages be reported as a list, including the number of individuals for each life stage. The example provided was: "2 adults 4 juveniles".

However, during an open public review within the TDWG community, a consensus was reached to not include lists of life stages, nor counts of individuals of a given life stage in the lifeStage field. In earlier versions of the commentaries about the term, the example "2 adults 4 juveniles" was given. This has been removed as being a mix of concepts and not a valid single value for the lifeStage of an Organism at the time of an Occurrence (since lifeStage of an Organism can change over time).

Here is an example. How should one populate Darwin Core terms for a record of 2 adults and 4 juveniles in a single lot?

Strictly speaking, there is no single life stage that matches the biological individuals in this example lot Occurrence record, and so the lifeStage field should be left blank.

lifeStage = null individualCount = 6 dynamicProperties = { "count of adults":2, "count of juveniles":4 }