The Biological Records Centre (BRC) website lists 105 national schemes and societies, many of whom we work with to support the collection, verification, visualisation and analysis of biological records:
• 87 recording schemes (unstructured)
• 8 monitoring schemes (structured)
• 10 other (study groups etc.)
In the last couple of months we have circulated a consultation relating to the mapping and visualisation of records, plus the provision of automated feedback to recorders; and also a consultation focusing specifically on the collating and sharing of fungus records.
Many thanks to the scheme organisers, verifiers and others who have responded to these. The results are being analysed and will help inform future work in these areas (you can also see more about these projects in the presentations from the BRC Recording Schemes Meeting).
We will also be consulting with recording schemes over a number of topics that are part of the Natural Capital Ecosystem Assessment (NCEA) Programme with Natural England. This will include work to redevelop the Record Cleaner tools as an online web service that will be available to anyone to use for running checks against their biological records, and that will make it easier for recording scheme experts to edit the existing rules where needed, or to add new sets of rules for species groups that have not yet been covered.
Another strand of the NCEA work is looking at options to enable more sharing of unverified records, while ensuring that these are clearly indicated as being unverified and what that means for potential users of the data. We are liaising with the NBN Trust over how this might be handled on the NBN Atlas.
National recording scheme organisers will be contacted directly about some of these issues over the summer, but if you have any questions please email us at brc@ceh.ac.uk.
Alongside these new developments, BRC continues to support the publication of atlases in book form, with an atlas of click-beetles (by Howard Mendel) nearing completion, and an atlas of caddisflies (by Ian Wallace and James O’Connor) in preparation.
BRC is grateful to the following for support of the work described above:
- Natural England (through their NCEA programme)
- JNCC (through the BReVI agreement)
- UKCEH and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) as part of the ACCESS-UK programme delivering National Capability