The Record Cleaner tool is designed to help you spot potential problems in your wildlife records. It can find incorrectly formatted entries (such as dates or grid references), and can highlight species that have been recorded in unexpected locations or at unusual times of year.
To use it you can upload a set of records from a csv file, run the checks, and download reports that highlight any errors or unusual species records. The formatting checks can be applied to any records; species checks are available for many species groups (including plants, birds, mammals and a range of invertebrate groups).
For many years Record Cleaner was available as a stand-alone piece of software, which can still be downloaded from the NBN Record Cleaner page. However, the stand-alone software is no longer being maintained, and during 2024-25 the web-based version of Record Cleaner was developed to provide a replacement, and to open up the option of making Record Cleaner more widely applicable to other recording systems that can access it via an API (documentation available via Github).
The rules that Record Cleaner uses to check records against species ranges and times of year have been defined by the relevant national recording schemes, and in some cases have not been updated for a number of years. We will be developing additional tools to make it easier for the rules to be edited and updated, and would be pleased to hear from any recording schemes that wish to be involved in this process.
Record Cleaner has been redeveloped by UKCEH Biological Records Centre, building on the earlier NBN Record Cleaner system, and with support from Defra, via the Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment Programme, and from Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) National Capability funding.
