Basic Queries

Filtering

A population biologist (Dr. Undómiel) who studies the population dynamics of Dipodomys spectabilis would like to use some data from Portal, but she doesn’t know how to work with large datasets. Being the kind and benevolent person that you are, write a query to extract the data that she needs. She wants only the data for her species of interest, when each individual was trapped, and what sex it was. She doesn’t care about where it was trapped within the site because she is going to analyze the entire site as a whole and she doesn’t care about the size of the individuals. Obviously she doesn’t need the species codes because you’re only providing her with the data for one species, and besides since she isn’t actually looking at the database itself the two character abbreviation would probably be confusing. Save this query as Spectabilis Population Data.

Scroll through the results of your query. Do you notice anything that might be an issue for the scientist to whom you are providing this data? [you should] Think about what you should do in this situtation…

You decide that to avoid invoking her wrath, you’ll send her a short e-mail* requesting clarification regarding what she would like you to do regarding this complexity. Dr. Undómiel e-mails you back and asks that you create two additional queries so that she can decided what to do about this issue later. She would like you to add a query to the same data as above, but only for cases where the sex is known to be male, and an additional query with the same data, but only where the sex is known to be female. Save these as Spectabilis Population Data Males and Spectabilis Population Data Females.

*Short for elven-mail