Bugs Coleopteran Ecology Package
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Scientific research programmes and research prioritization - SEAD could be used to undertake background research, providing information on the
current amount and type of evidence available for a particular region andor period. In this way SEAD could be used to help assess the state of knowledge of environmental
archaeologicalarchaeological investigations on a regional basis, and identify critical areas for future research. This would also be useful in designing comprehensive
research programs, in that SEAD would be able to quantify the amount of work done in the proposed research area, and thus allow researchers to strategically target funding to
achieve the most beneficial results. One could, for example, use SEAD to see exactly how much data exists on the Neolithic period of Skåne, relate this to the more
intensively researched Iron Age of the same area, and then devise an investigative strategy for best analysing the development of agriculture in southern Sweden.
Collections and conservation prioritization
- SEAD could easily identify gaps is modern reference collections and preserved fossils, and thus direct researchers to preferentially collect or preserve particular specimens.
This concept could be expanded to include digital photography of specimens as described in section 5.7.2, and would be of benefit to a wider audience including
natural history museums and collections coordinators.
Environmental and cultural resource management
- As record of archaeological and environmental investigations SEAD would provide a unique system for highlighting cultural environments in need of preservation due to
either their special character or rarity. Alone, this would be extremely useful in the development of conservation programs at a national or local level, and could easily be
integrated into community planning projects. In combination with research prioritization exercises this be an extremely powerful tool for shaping the future of
Methodological research and development
- With its ability to hold several analysis datasets from any set of samples, in addition to storing method descriptions and publications, SEAD could be used to compare analysis
techniques and assess their relative advantages under differing situations. Even the ‘simple’ collation of data, and ability to export and summarize it, would provide unique
test sets of a scale which permit the application of statistical methods normally avoided due to lack of data. the environmental reconstruction methods implemented in
BugsCEP
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are an example of statistical techniques which have required database implementation.. SEAD could also be used to highlight deficiencies in certain methods
or areas that lack a desired degree of quality or quantification – thus giving potential directions for the development future methods.
Multi-proxy analyses
- The integration of datasets from several proxy sources will be facilitated through SEAD’s interface system. This will enable multi-site and multi variable analyses to be
undertaken on a larger and more complex scale than is normally feasible. Such multi- proxy investigations could give new insights into the history of the interrelations of
environmental and cultural change.
Advanced uni-proxy analyses
- The investigative tools built into SEAD, and its ability to collate and summarize vast amounts of data from a variety of spatial and temporal scales will allow for a deeper
analysis of single proxy variables than is practical today.
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Towards expert systems and The Grand Unifying Database
- The application of state of the art computational techniques such as neural networks and multi-database data mining could lead to the development of semi-intelligent
analysis systems for the interpretation of data from archaeology and other Quaternary sciences. A multi-nodal system, essentially spanning several online databases, would be
an interesting alternative to the age old concept of a single database for all Quaternary data.