The Biological Records Centre (BRC) and BugLife held a freshwater biological recorders workshop on the 9th October at CEH Lancaster. The workshop was attended by representatives of the freshwater recording community including volunteer recording scheme organisers, NGOs working to support recording of freshwater species and habitats, local records centres and ALERC.
The overarching aims of the workshop were to:
The Biological Records Centre has collaborated with a number of recording schemes and mobile app developers to launch a range of smartphone apps in the past 5 years. These apps provide identification resources and aim to make it easy to submit wildlife records. The sightings go to iRecord, allowing recorders to see all their observations in one place.
Over recent months BRC have been working with the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland to bring a ‘square bashing’ data input mode to iRecord. The results of this can be found at www.brc.ac.uk/irecord/enter-vascular-plants and a PDF overview of the functionality (in the form of a poster recently presented at the BSBI Scottish Recorders’ Meeting and the Annual Exhibition Meetings) is available here.