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invertebrate recording schemes – call for atlas records

Three national recording schemes are currently collating records for their forthcoming national atlases, and have deadlines fast approaching. I managed to get myself sufficiently organised today to send off my records, so am feeling smug, and if anyone else has data to contribute I’m sure it would be very welcome.

  • Ladybird recording scheme: atlas due for publication in 2010, records accepted up until “spring 2009” (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae) – if you can recognise a Seven-spot Ladybird you can contribute to this!
  • The Larger Brachycera recording scheme covers several families of Diptera (flies), including soldier-flies, horse-flies, bees-flies and a few others. Records needed “as soon as possible”.
  • The Centipede (Chilopoda) recording scheme also has an atlas in the pipeline – not sure of the timescale, but again all records are requested. Centipedes are not the easiest creatures to identify, but there is a very good recent Field Studies Council key to them, by recording scheme organiser Tony Barber.
Geophilus carpophagus
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analysing county moth datasets

County moth datasets tend to be large and ‘messy’ affairs – messy in the sense that they are large aggregations of data from a variety of sources, collected using a variety of methods. Some people will run a mercury vapour trap all night long in their garden, several times a week; others will run an occasional actinic trap for a few hours on a nature reserve; others will just send in a few sightings of moths they’ve found by day. Is it possible to draw any overall conclusions about which moths are increasing or decreasing from this mass/mess of data?

In an attempt to look at this for the Berkshire moth database, I’ve set up some user queries for use in MapMate that compare numbers of records and of individuals of particular species against total numbers for the year. Full details and a download of the queries are here on my kitenet website. Here are the resulting graphs for Mottled Rustic, currently doing very poorly in Berkshire:

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New key to plants

The long-awaited new “Vegetative Key to the British Flora” (by John Poland and Eric Clement) is nearing completion. BSBI are now advertising a pre-publication offer: if you order before the 17th April it will cost £20 inclusive, whereafter it will cost £25 plus p&p.

You can download a flyer for the book from the BSBI website (see the top-right-hand corner of the site).

The authors claim that (with experience) you’ll be able to identify most plants within 60 seconds! (personally I’d be happy if I could get somewhere near identifying most plants within 60 hours …)

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revised MapMate user queries

Ages ago I circulated a set of MapMate user queries to extend the standard “Browse all records” query with extra details, including determiner, national status for rare species, some higher taxon classifications, etc.

I was recently asked to revise these queries, updating and slightly extending them. The revised versions can be downloaded here.

(see the fourth bullet point “SQL text (.txt file) for custom User Queries to browse records with additional details”)