If you are familiar with the concept of biological recording then read on but, if you are new to it and want to learn more, then have a look at What is Biological Recording? before reading about a few updates we have planned.
As many of you will have seen, over the last few months I have been asking you for info, via the Facebook Group and/or direct contact, on the total number of records you have digitised over your life time.
Why are we doing this? Two reasons:
- To show what the collective recording effort of pan-species listers is. We won’t be having a “recording rankings”, just a place on your profile (under ‘Biological Recording’) to enter a single total for your digitised records and the date you entered it. This will then collate into one single figure that will appear in the ‘Statistics’ box on the home page and will show something like “3,792,544 records collated by 35 listers”. We have taken the liberty of adding the totals you have provided to me already on to your profiles: if you are unhappy with this, you can edit/remove the figure easily, but please consider keeping it as it will greatly add weight to what we are doing. I think this total is pretty darn amazing and the fact that we rival a LERC already is incredible; as an example, Sussex Biodiversity Records Centre currently holds over 11.2 million records submitted by more than 1,200 recorders. We have generated over a third of that total with only 3% of the recorders!
- To encourage better record keeping among pan-listers, especially with so many new people joining from a more birding background over the last year. This seemed like a great opportunity to bring biological recording into the heart of what we are doing and by having this accumulative total that will grow over time (and that we can all add too–no matter if it’s half a million records or a handful), we can all contribute. I expect I will update mine at least annually and we hope that everyone will do this. I’ll send out regular reminders when I update my record total, which for me is at the end of March/start of April each year before fieldwork commences in earnest, but you could update as often as you like.
Ideally, these records are then further shared to places like iRecord, local record centres and/or recording schemes. My working principle is, that anyone who goes to such lengths as to digitise a lifetime’s worth of natural history experiences, will want those records shared and used as much as possible. However, we accept that there are sometimes contractual and logistical limitations to this, so that some of your records will be pending submission. Don’t worry about excluding those, just provide a total of everything you have digested, they’ll find their way into wider use eventually.
It's fairly easy for me as I can just get the figure from my Recorder 6 database but you might have records in Excel, iRecord, iNaturalist, with one or more LRCs, BirdTrack, etc. Or all of the above. In which case, rough figures will do fine. Whatever works. If you have years’ worth of data in notebooks, this is a gentle encouragement to get that digitised and shared! And if you pan-species list but don’t record, well hopefully this is the start of an exciting chapter in your life where you start biological recording.
Although it’s hugely important that biological records are submitted and used more widely, we accept that that’s not the only reason to record. Recording itself is greatly beneficial to the individual making the records–adding a level of structure and rigour to a lifetime’s worth of effort. My personal enjoyment from generating my own species maps daily in my #speciesaday feature on X/Twitter, is as much for me to gain insight into my own records (such as revealing distributions of species I was unaware of, or highlight glaring gaps in my recording) as it is to inspire others. Biological recording is brilliant fun and hugely worthwhile for many different reasons but you’ll get the most out it, and more importantly nature will get the most out if it, if you do share them somewhere where others can use the. And doing so means, they are likely to still be of value in perpetuity, I take great comfort knowing my records will still be used long after I am gone.
We are also going to have a place for you to add the total number of species you have recorded new to Britain (and Ireland, Isle of Man and Channel Isles!) on your profile, which will again add up to form a collective total on the front page. We’ll display the figures together to look something like “3,792,544 records collated by 35 listers, including 204 species new to the British Isles”.
There are clearly many different levels of contribution towards a first for the British Isles–don’t get too hung up on this, whether you found it and identified it alone, as part of a group or identified it from someone else: these all count. We’ll also leave a space for you to list your species and provide a bit more info. It’s expected that multiple people might claim the same species and this is totally fine. We expect that we’ll have to do some editing of the final total to reflect this, but this won’t affect your total. If there are any reasons why a species you’ve had new to Britain might be shared by other people/listers, please highlight that on your list of species. My four species were fairly clear cut as being my records alone but a recent bug I had new to the British Isles on Jersey is an example where things might get difficult. Someone else can claim this when it eventually turns up in the UK and that’s fine, we’ll edit the total to reflect this. When a new species turns up and spreads rapidly, multiple people might find it in the same year but in these situations, one person is likely to have found it first and in those cases, they alone should really claim that record, unless you made some other significant contribution to its identification.