speciesin

Speciesin is a term used in biodiversity informatics to describe the set of species observed, expected, or recorded within a defined spatial or temporal unit. The term is not widely standardized and may appear as 'species in' lists, field inventory tags, or data field labels in various projects.

In ecology, 'speciesin' commonly refers to the roster of species detected or predicted for a site, produced from field surveys, environmental DNA samples, or species distribution models. It serves as a basis for calculating species richness, turnover, and occupancy estimates, and is often compared with a 'speciesout' list to identify absences.

In data systems, speciesin can be implemented as a data structure or object that stores taxonomic information, conservation status, occurrence records, and metadata such as date and method of detection. It may be used in dashboards, reproducible analysis pipelines, and conservation prioritization workflows.

Challenges for the speciesin concept include taxonomic updates, synonymy, sampling bias, and incomplete detection. The quality of a speciesin depends on sampling effort, methods, and data quality, and users should document criteria for inclusion.

See also biodiversity informatics, species richness, occupancy modeling.