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← All lessons Lesson 14 of 18 · 1 min

If the Station Was Someone Else's

Wherever your station came from, some record of it may exist: your own captures from Reef Demographer, an earlier cohort's Entry, a photograph somebody took because the reef looked nice. Almost none of it will meet this course's capture standard, because it was shot before anyone knew what would be wanted.

That is the ordinary condition of every long-term monitoring program, and your own record will one day be the older data somebody else has to assess.

You do not edit it. An inherited record is never reformatted, corrected or re-scored. Your contribution is a separate dated Entry under your own name. The temptation to tidy is strong — the format is awkward, the class list is one you dislike, there is an error you are certain about — and it must be resisted, because correcting it destroys the record of who observed what, when, and how. That provenance is what lets a later reader judge any of it.

And here is the trap. The earlier record used a different class list, or fewer points. Your figures and theirs do not line up. The obvious fix is to re-score their images with your method, and then they match beautifully. Do not. Re-scoring the old record to your method makes the two agree by construction, so the less the two methods had in common originally, the cleaner the agreement you manufacture. State the difference and narrow what the comparison supports. Coarser class list: compare at the coarser level. Fewer points: their uncertainty was wider and stays wider.

Quick check

Three questions, drawn at random from this lesson's set, one attempt each. The right answer is shown either way. Two of three opens the next lesson; fewer and you get another three. Nothing is recorded anywhere but this browser, and this is not the Knowledge Review — it is a way of showing the lesson was read.

Generated from the Reef Chronicler Student Handbook, version 1.0. The course documents are the authority; if these pages and they ever disagree, the documents are right.