Capturing flora and fauna stats - surveys and impact

[Faith Matthews]

What tools / Apps/ resources do people recommend please for identifying and capturing species of flora and fauna?
We are planning some widlflower meadow creation around our Parish and we wish to capture a baseline this spring of what plant and insect species we have (and don't have) before we sow later this year. The plan is to assess what impact our project (hopefully, positively) has...and to undertake recording in the same locations at the same time year on year. So we want to be able to compare detailed figures at a very local level; but it would also be great to input these figures in to the broader national picture somehow.

What do people use to identify and count and capture such figures please? We want to open up this initiative to the whole community, so need it to be as accessible as possible... if there were a user friendly App that did this that would be super (we could provide leaflets or print outs for community members without a smart phone and input what they found ourselves). Or there may be another tool or resource.

Any user friendly ideas very welcome!

With thanks in advance
Faith

[Amy]

https://www.brc.ac.uk/irecord/
"The goal of iRecord is to make it easier for wildlife sightings to be collated, checked by experts and made available to support research and decision-making at local and national levels. Join iRecord now to share your sightings with the recording community, explore dynamic maps and graphs of your data and make a real contribution to science and conservation."....

"iRecord is a website for sharing wildlife observations (biological records), including associated photos – you can register quickly and for free. Once registered, you can add your own records for others to see, and you can see what has been recorded by others. Your data will be kept secure and will be regularly backed up.

Automatic checks will be applied to your observations to help spot potential errors, and experts can review your sightings. All wildlife sightings are shared with other users and made available to National Recording Schemes (and their county recorders where relevant), and to Local Environmental Records Centres. Most records are also shared more widely via the NBN Atlas, and with a range of bona fide organisations for research and conservation."......

"Many different websites and apps link to the iRecord data warehouse; here are some examples of the larger projects that do so:

UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme
NatureSpot
Capturing Our Coast
SEWBReCord
National Plant Monitoring Scheme
CEDaR Online Recording
Mammal Society
Wild Sheffield - Nature Counts
Yorkshire Naturalists' Union
Suffolk Biodiversity Information Service
LERC Wales app"

There are maps to pin point your identifications. Covers plants/insects/anything..

[Tracey Hamston]

Yes, iRECORD is good.
A warning that many apps store your records but that's where they stay and there's no way of getting them verified to make sure species are what you say they are. Biological records are valuable data that helps inform the status of wildlife and are held by our Devon Biological Records Centre DBRC and also centrally as described in Amy's message.

I'm hoping to develop some guidance on this, along with the DBRC, to make sure all this lovely valuable data isn't disappearing into 'black holes'.

It would be great to get feedback from everyone about what they want in terms of easy forms or anything else.

COMMENTS PLEASE

Tracey

[Kim]

I have been collating my records and sending them every year to DBRC on a spreadsheet. It is pretty time-consuming, even though I do it annually. I do make use of copy and paste, but checking dates, abundance, etc. takes time. In addition I use iRecord for ad hoc records away from home. My smart phone is already full, so I cannot use apps on it, only web-based apps. In the past, DBRC has said they prefer to get records direct, rather than via iRecord and I guess that is for commercial reasons, as they can sell the data to ecologists.

[jackieandrade]

There’s a balance between an app that everyone can use and one that gives completely sound data for research/recording. I would use iNaturalist for crowd sourcing lots of recordings from the community and iRecord for a proper ecological survey by someone who knows what they are doing

[LauraM]

An interesting discussion, thank you. I work for two local environmental record centres (LERC) in Wales and data flows can be a bit of a headache. Separate to that I am the project lead for the Big Meadow Search (www.bigmeadowsearch.co.uk @bigmeadowsearch on Twitter and Big Meadow Search Facebook private group). This is a multi-purpose project that is trying to raise interest and awareness of grassland plants and their associated invertebrate, fungi and galls (meadows, road verges, churchyards, woodland rides, amenity grassland etc) with frequent posts on Twitter and Facebook alongside running a UK and Ireland wide search period 1st June to 31st August where we want people to get out and about to record the plant species they see. Records can be submitted on our website https://bigmeadowsearch.co.uk/submit
We will collate all the data and forward records to the appropriate LERC.
The reason I mention all this is that we have compiled a Big Meadow Search grassland indicator species list based on the National Plant Monitoring Scheme plus additional grassland species of interest. The list of species, along with their positive or negative indicator status, can be downloaded from our website on the Resources page and might be helpful for your project https://bigmeadowsearch.co.uk/resources
It would be great to get more people involved from this network. The map shows the current search site distribution.
I hope this is of interest. Any questions please contact me on bigmeadowsearch@gmail.com