RECORDING – WHAT’S THE POINT?

 Biological recording should be more than collecting train numbers, shouldn’t it? For some it starts as a compulsion to make lists. For others it may be the need to name something. Good reasons, but why not make it “valuable”. Worth doing for the sake of science, or someone else’s interest, or conservation.

ADD VALUE by sharing what you record! Pass your records to the County Recorder. Or put them on a database. Or send them to the local records centre.

To be of any interest to anyone else a basic biological record must have the four basic components: WHO – WHAT- WHERE – WHEN.

The WHO tells everyone which person “collected” the record. It is a person or organisation that one can go back to to query the record, or elaborate it. When it comes to the verification of data on a database, it gives the authority doing the verification an idea of how reliable the record is if it is a known person or group.

The WHAT tells us a species or genera name. Unless a biological group has a recognised list of vernacular names, the WHAT will be a scientific name. (A note here; this is often called the Latin name, but a lot of scientific names are actually part Latin, part Greek. Also it is generally printed in italics, with the initial letter of the generic name capitalised, and the specific name in lower case hence Bellis perennis. The birders generally record by the vernacular name, but they recognise a list of vernacular names.)

The WHERE to be of any use must contain an Ordnance Survey Grid Reference composed of two initial letters to denote the 100 km square, and pairs of numerals to represent the hectad (10 km – two figure reference), tetrad (4 km – two figures and a letter) or monad (1 km square – four figures), and so on down to 1 m square. So SX368724 represents a square of 100 m. Often a “location” is added to the WHERE so that a general area is easily recognised. But this should really be a name on a map, rather than a local name which is not often printed. For the purpose of recording for distribution Atlases, the resolution of the record may be relatively coarse, so the early flora atlases were recorded either by hectads or tetrads. The 2000 Flora of Cornwall, for instance, was recorded at a tetrad resolution, whereas the 2020 edition was recorded at a monad (1km) resolution. But the National Atlas of British flora was recorded at the hectad resolution.

The WHEN is fairly straightforward and obvious. But remember that a “time period”, say May or “dusk” is equally valid provided it is accompanied by some reference to a date.

But the bare minimum for a record, the person, the species, a 1 km square and a date really only give a bare minimum of information. It tells you that Joe Bloggs recorded a mole at SX28 on Jan 1^st 2022. A mole was here then. In actual fact it was a mole hill ( a “sign”); it was in grassland (“habitat”) at the edge of the A30 at SX219803 at Trewint. Suddenly it becomes more interesting. For all the records of Mole (Talpa europea), how many are really of a live animal. For a butterfly, was it an adult or a caterpillar? How do you know it was Soprano Pipistrelle; was it determined by a bat detector? Did you see that Long-eared Bat, or was it a “feeding roost”? How many Glossy Ibis were there?

A good recording database will have “fields” (with extensive drop-down list of terms) for such things as Stage, Breeding, Habitat, Sign, Number/Frequency, Abundance, Associations among others. The more detail one can add to the basic record the more value it will be to someone or some project in the future. At the time we make the record we can have no concept of how useful it may be.

So I make a plea to all you listers. Please add as much detail as you can to your records. If you are passing them on to a Recorder, discuss it with them, and in particular the format they would prefer it in. But if you are entering data directly on to a database, fill in as many of those boxes as you can.

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THE DIFFERENT RECORDING OBJECTIVES.

RECORDING

MONITORING

SURVEYING

“Recording” is usually something undertaken by an individual, initially for their own pleasure and interest, and starts off locally, although with groups it may extend. But it is frequently local or county based, but by entering the data on to a database the cumulative results become much more widely disseminated.

“Monitoring” is usually nationally based and initiated by national organisations (The British Trust For Ornithology, Butterfly Conservation, Bat Conservation Trust). Very well thought out and rigid methodology give very valuable data on a national geographical spread, with good quality data comparable from one year  to another, from one place to another, and from one recorder to another.

“Surveying” may be organised nationally or locally, by national bodies (BCT, BTO) or local interest groups (Cornwall Mammal Group). (It is also widely undertaken by ecologists to inform planning applications and the like. But I am talking here of the voluntary effort.) It is often species specific and usually a “one-off”.  So the recent Harvest Mouse Survey organised by the Mammal Society was a national effort this last autumn and winter to look for signs of Harvest Mouse, in which we in the Cornwall Mammal Group took part. Some, like the national Otter survey, repeat every few years, to look for changes over time, but are not repeated at regular intervals as monitoring programmes are.

 

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                                                                   ©ERICA database. 

Without disclosing anything personal, this tells you that within this 100 m. square there was a Brown Long-eared Bat using a feeding roost over the month of August in 2020. This database shows that it lists Sites, so there may be more information on this under that heading. But the Habit field tells you what the bat was doing; and the Sign field tells you how that was determined. (“Notes” fields are useful, but it would be difficult for a researcher to glean what they want to know from all the information that may be included under this field.) So, for instance, a researcher looking for feeding roosts of bats, or how many records of this species are determined by signs other than a live bat in the hand can amass a lot of data from these sorts of records.

 

 

©ERICA database

                     This distribution map of Hazel in Cornwall at the hectad (100 km. Squares) resolution shows that it occurs all across Cornwall.

 

 

Now at the monad (1 km square) resolution it shows the thumbprint of Bodmin Moor and the clay country in mid-Cornwall. But look at the empty squares along all those coasts exposed to the westerly winds. Suddenly we get a suspicion that Hazel probably doesn’t like salt winds!   

So by recording at the monad level rather than some coarser resolution, we can deduce something about the conditions this plant needs to be happy. You probably wouldn’t have known that until you see this distribution map AT THIS RESOLUTION. (The coverage of the rest of the County will tell you that this is not an artefact of recording effort.)

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So both of these examples show clearly that the extra information recorded tells us more about that species than the bare WHO, WHAT, WHERE, and WHEN would have told us. We’ve “added value” to the record. It satisfies more than just our compulsion to list things! It has satisfied other peoples’ interests as well!

A. Atkinson 22/03/2022.