Glossary
The records, fields, and values that the rest of the documentation refers to.
Sepal is built on four records that nest inside each other. A location holds material, a material belongs to an accession, and an accession points at a taxon. This page defines those four records and the other terms that the task pages use.
Accession
An accession is one arrival of one taxon. Each of the following is one accession:
- A batch of seed from a collecting trip.
- A plant bought from a nursery.
- A cutting sent by another garden.
An accession needs a Code that you choose and a Taxon. Sepal requires
nothing else. The provenance, the supplier, the intended location, and the dates
received and accessioned are all optional. Sepal does not impose a format on the
code. Gardens commonly use the year and a serial number, such as 2026.0001,
but any code that is unique to you works.
Activity
An activity is one recorded change to a record, together with the user who made it and the time it happened. Sepal writes an activity when you create or update an accession, a material, a location, or a taxon. The Activity section lists them for the whole collection, and each record’s panel has an Activity section of its own.
Contact
A contact is a person or an organization that your collection deals with, such as a nursery, another garden, or a collector. An accession’s Supplier field points at a contact.
Location
A location is a place that holds material, such as a greenhouse, a bed, a shelf, or a field. A location needs a Name and a Code, each at least two characters, and it takes an optional Description.
Material
A material is a quantity of an accession at one location. If you sow twenty seeds from one accession into two flats in two greenhouses, you have two materials. A material needs a Code, an Accession, a Location, a Type, a Status, and a Quantity.
Sepal records each move between locations and each change in quantity. The quantity you see is the current one, and the history of those changes stays on the record.
Material type
The type of a material records what the material is. The values are plant, seed, vegetative, tissue, and other.
Material status
The status of a material records what became of it. The values are alive, dead, dormant, transferred, other, and unknown. A material whose status is dead, transferred, or other has to have a quantity of zero, because a lot that is no longer current cannot hold plants.
Provenance
Provenance records how a plant came to be where it is. It is an optional field on an accession, and it is worth setting. Set Provenance Type to one of the following values:
| Value | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Wild | Collected from a wild population |
| Cultivated | Taken from a cultivated plant |
| Not wild | Known not to be of wild origin |
| Purchase | Bought, with origin unrecorded |
| Insufficient data | Not known |
For wild material, Wild Provenance Status records whether the population was native where it was collected.
Tag
A tag is a label that you attach to records so that you can find them together. A tag has a name and an optional description, and you can apply one to an accession, a material, or a taxon.
Taxon
A taxon is a botanical name at any rank, such as the species Quercus alba or the genus Acer. The setup wizard offers to import the World Flora Online Plantlist, so most instances already hold the names you need, and an instance that skipped it starts with none. You search for a name instead of typing it.
Why accessions and materials are separate
An accession records where a plant came from and when it arrived. It records that once, for the whole arrival. A material records how many plants are alive and where they are. Sepal updates the material as plants are moved, propagated, and lost.
One record cannot do both jobs. If Sepal stored the provenance on the record that tracks living plants, the provenance would disappear when the last plant died. Storing a copy of the provenance on every row would create duplicates that drift apart.
Further reading
Managing a plant collection is a practice with its own published guidance, and that guidance is independent of any one piece of software. The reference below describes the practice rather than Sepal.
- Guide to Accessioning Living Collections, published by Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI).