LEPILIST DEMONSTRATION

In this demonstration you will look over the shoulder of Ms. Lucy Lacewing as she goes thru the "click-by-click" tutorials in the LepiList manual.

Using LepiList to keep life lists
Using LepiList to record sightings/collections
Using LepiList to display the records
Using LepiList to display selected records
Using short lists to facilitate data entry

USING LEPILIST TO KEEP LIFE LISTS

You can see from the program's Main menu, shown below, that she is just starting since there are no records in the database. You can also see that one of the Main menu options is to display or print the How do I...? window, which has detailed instructions for carrying out every LepiList procedure.

• What you cannot see is that, when the program runs, pointing at any enabled button for a second or two produces a box attached to the button and containing a brief explanation of what the button does.
• It should also be said that LepiList allows dates to be in either a month-day-year format (the default which Lucy uses) or in a day-month-year format and the year to be anywhere in the range 1900 to 2100.

   LepiList Main menu

Following instructions in the first tutorial, Lucy clicks the Initialize button. This produces the first page of a list of the 800+ species and subspecies of North American butterflies with their families and subfamilies, seen below. Then she hilights Eversmann's Parnassian, Parnassius eversmanni by clicking its line.

• Its sequence number, at the top of the page, shows it is the 1st species of the 1st subfamily (Parnassiinae) of the 1st family (Papilionidae) in the taxonomical sequence.

   The first page of the North American butterfly list

Initializing allows putting into nine lists built into the database limited information about the butterflies Lucy has already seen/collected before obtaining LepiList. But before showing her how to do this, the tutorials must show how to move the hilighting among the butterfly species and families. In addition to moving the hilighting to a different line by clicking that line, it can also be done by tapping the CursorDown, CursorUp, PageDown, and PageUp keys. To change to another page Lucy would click the Next, Forward, Previous, Backward, or Jump (to any page) buttons.

• Another way of moving the hilighting is to use the Com.Find (common name find) and Sci.Find (scientific name find) buttons.

As suggested by the tutorials, Lucy clicks Com.Find and sees what you see next:

   Common name find window

Following instructions, Lucy types dswoodny, a unique character sequence in Mead's Wood-Nymph, and then clicks OK. Almost instantly Mead's Wood-Nymph, on page 19, is hilighted.

• LepiList's ability to ignore capitalization, spaces, hyphens, and apostrophes in a common name find is very convenient during common name finds.

Lucy next clicks Sci.Find to produce what is shown below:

  Scientific name find window

In a scientific name find it is usually necessary to type only the first syllable of the genus, a space, then the first syllable of the species. Lucy demonstrates this by typing spe mor then clicking OK, which hilights Speyeria mormonia.

Next Lucy is shown how to initialize. Pretending that one of the butterflies she has already seen is the Large Marble, Euchloe ausonides, she is told to hilight it and either click Use or double-click its line. The Initialize menu, seen below, appears:

   Initializing built-in lists

The tutorials also pretend that Lucy lives at a certain address in the county of Santa Barbara, in the state of California, in the U.S., and that she maintains species lists for each of these geographical regions. They further assume that she has assigned the lists called Special 1 to butterflies photographed, Special 2 to butterflies seen as caterpillars, and Special 3 to butterflies collected after seeing. Furthermore, the tutorials assume that she has seen a Large Marble in Santa Barbara county and that she has photographed one. So she clicks Locale (which automatically puts it on the Inclusive, Nation, and Region lists as well), then clicks Special 1, and then clicks OK. Next she puts some other butterflies on appropriate lists, as instructed by the tutorials.

When initializing is finished, clicking Quit at the bottom of the button column of the species/families pages puts Lucy back at the LepiList Main menu. There she click Present, in order to present a list of the species on her Inclusive list. She is then at the Present menu, seen next:

   Present menu

Since the list Lucy wants is the default, all she need do is click OK to produce what follows. But do note that the Present menu has many options, including options to output the lists presented on paper or to disk files.

    Lucy's inclusive list

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USING LEPILIST TO RECORD SIGHTINGS/COLLECTIONS

Next the tutorials teach Lucy how to use the Enter records option. Entering a record puts in the database a complete specification of where, when, and how a butterfly was seen/collected. This is in contrast to the partial information recorded by using the Initialize option to put a butterfly on one or more of the database's nine built-in lists. Entering records is the best way for a user to handle his/her historic sightings/collections, but it takes more time than initializing.

Whenever a sighting/collection record is entered LepiList updates any of the built-in lists that may need updating. So the Enter records option is what is used to record current sightings/collections after all the historic sightings/collections have been put in the database either by initializing or by entering records; LepiList maintains all of the built-in lists automatically.

The first step in entering records is to click Enter at the Main menu. Lucy does so then sees the Trip Profile menu, which allows description of the general location and circumstances of a group of related records, plus specification of a location code for these records and of their date.

   Starting to enter Lucy's trip to San Luis Obispo Co., California

In the tutorials the first records to be entered are those from a trip to a lake near the shore in San Luis Obispo county, California. Lucy first types an abbreviation for the county, S.L.O. Co. Then she clicks Store (which will be enabled) to store the abbreviation in a drop-down list for future use. Then she types the remainder of the line. Next she uses the drop-down list of more than 300 two- or three-letter codes to enter the code ca for California. There are several ways to do this, and the tutorials explain each of them.

• If additional Description lines are needed they can by typed at the beginning of the note for the trip's first record, then easily copied into the note for each of its subsequent records by using the Copy and Paste functions of the Editing tools that are in the record note window shown below.

Also in the trip profile is a Date drop-down list, which always holds today's date plus the date last entered, and lets Lucy enter the date of the trip. Then she clicks Region so that all records entered will go on her Region (California) and Nation (U.S.) built-in lists. Furthermore, doing this sets to Yes for all records to be entered in the trip markers called Re (for Region) and Na (for Nation). Finally, she clicks the OK button.

She then sees the species/families pages, just as when initializing. Hilighting the first species of the trip, Mormon Metalmark, Apodemia mormo, she clicks Use or double-clicks its line. This produces a window that follows, in which she can type a note for the record:

   The Mormon Metalmark record note

As instructed by the tutorials, Lucy starts the note with the marker S1 which will put the species on her photographed list. When the note is finished, she clicks OK and is back at the species/families pages. She enters the remaining records of the trip and then clicks Quit to return to the LepiList Main menu. Finally, she enters in the database three more tutorial trips.

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USING LEPILIST TO DISPLAY THE RECORDS

 Now the tutorials tell Lucy how to use the Display sighting/collection records option, by leading her thru a number of examples. First she is told to click Display from the Main menu. Doing it, she sees the Display menu that you see next:

   Display menu

For the first example, all the records in the database are displayed. Lucy does so by entering from the earliest date list the earliest possible date (which is 1-1-50 when the default date range is used) then entering from the latest date list today's date (which was 7-1-04 when the demonstration was produced) then clicking OK. The results are shown next:

   First page of Lucy's database of butterfly sightings and collections

The letter F means a record is the first of the species anywhere. The S1 marker means the record is one in which the butterfly was photographed (it allows selecting for display only records involving photographed species as well as putting these species on the S1 built-in list), and similarly for the other markers. Numbers like 01 02 0007 are taxonomic sequence numbers.

Note that every sighting/collection shows the location and circumstances described in the profile of the trip on which it was obtained as well as the trip profile location code and date. Also shown are each of the markers that were set to Yes in the trip profile -- or were included in the record note -- by listing the marker abbreviations. In addition, any note the sighting/collection may have is shown. The species are displayed in taxonomical sequence, with any multiple sightings/collections of a particular species chronologically subsequenced.

After inspecting the next page of the list of all records, Lucy clicks Quit to return to the Main menu.

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USING LEPILIST TO DISPLAY SELECTED RECORDS

The next example of the tutorials has her display a list of the species for which there are records in San Luis Obispo county. Clicking Display, she sees again the Display menu:

    Options that will list species recorded in a particular territory

To produce the desired display Lucy clicks Limitations as specified below, then clicks Geographic; required word/phrase, and then clicks One per species. Next she clicks Only show species to produce a condensed format for the output. Finally, she enters the same two dates she entered in the first example and then clicks OK.

• Before looking at the window that appears next, be sure to observe that there are a large number of choices to make on the Display menu, and that many of these each lead to a large number of other choices. Thus a very large number of different user-defined lists can be produced by LepiList, in addition to the nine built-in lists.

   Specifying the particular territory

In this window Lucy must first enter the code for California, which she obtains from the code drop-down list. Then she must enter the county abbreviation, S.L.O. Co., which she obtains from the word/phrase list where it was stored when doing the first trip profile of the tutorials. Then she clicks OK and is very rapidly shown the next list:

   Lucy's San Luis Obispo county life list

These records were accumulated on two different trips to San Luis Obispo county. And for two of the species listed there is actually more than one record. But the redundant records were eliminated by the One per species limitation imposed in the Display menu. Thus if Lucy watches, but does not collect, butterflies this list would be called her San Luis Obispo county life list. She can also produce annual lists for San Luis Obispo county by choosing appropriate date ranges in the Display menu. Or she can produce life and annual lists for anywhere else in the world. And that only scratches the surface of the listing possibilities offered by LepiList. Several more of them are illustrated in the tutorials.

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USING SHORT LISTS TO FACILITATE DATA ENTRY

But we must move on to the final topic illustrated in this demonstration -- Short Lists.

If a LepiList user repeatedly records sightings/collections of the limited number of species occurring in a particular area, such as his/her garden or county, these species can be put on a so-called short list using a simple procedure explained in the manual. It may take a few minutes to do so, but usually it is done only once. When it has been done a button labeled Exchange is in the button column of the species/families pages used when entering the records of a trip. The button can be seen below.

   The California short list

Here the California short list is in place. However, a click of the Exchange button will exchange it for the full North American list. Using a short list can speed considerably the process of entering records. If a species not usually in the area of the short list was seen/collected it will not be found on that list. But what is obviously a very important record can still be entered (with a suitably detailed record note) by clicking Exchange to get back to the full list. Then Exchange can be clicked again before the rest of the records for the trip are entered.

• A short list is also available when using the Initialize option. And when using the Present option output can be limited to short list species not on the inclusive list, thereby producing a hit list of the species of the short list area that have not yet been found, if the short list includes all those that should be found in the area.

The LepiList manual also demonstrates how to use the the program's ability to modify records of the database to correct any errors in them, how to maintain the database files in good order, how to update the species/families pages by changing or adding species and families, and how to customize the program to the needs of a particular user. But enough is enough! 

Click here for more information about LepiList.

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