Recommendations about what to put in sampling_location_ancillary, what to put in event

[mobb]

The next decision I am struggling with is, how much to put into the sampling_location_ancillary. There is a pretty wide table with lake conditions (~25 of them) should I turn them all into the long format or just leave the table as is and attach? It’ll be needed by pretty much all datasets from that survey, which includes water quality that would not go into the ecocom_dp.

[mobb]

I thought the idea of a long table for these was that they could all be put in (eg, 25 key-value pairs), and the wide format recreated as necessary.

[mobb]

info goes into samp_ancillary if info does not change from sampling event to sampling (or "infrequently"). if it does change, then its an event.
for community data, both are 'metadata'

to consider: if you drop datetime from the samp_loc_ancillary, then it is limited to things that do not change.
we added this because we suspected that people would want to describe things like the date some experimental treatment was applied, eg that fertilization occurred on date A.

[clnsmth]

These recommendations will be covered in the shared practice docs (soon to be released).