2 minute read
Recording progress
2020 has proved to be a bumper year for botanical recording in Shropshire. Recently we have struggled to get many records, with our target of 10,000 not having been achieved sometimes. On the plus side, this has given us an opportunity to work on some of the lower priority datasets from the past, but the number of interesting records acquired from that is small. This year we decided to offer some small incentives to people to do more recording. A bursary of £500 each was awarded to Jon Shanklin and John Martin to ‘bash’ some monads. The aim of this is to get a decent number of species recorded in the tetrad in one year, which should allow us to detect change in a similar way to the BSBI’s Monitoring Scheme. This, we feel, is far more useful than just getting a few random records from around the county, which is good for finding out the basic distribution of a plant, but not for much more than that. So far, we have been rewarded with nearly 10,000 records and there are more to come. In addition to that, Kate Thorne has sent in more than 4,000 and various other people have contributed 1,000 more. I notice that iRecord has about 5,000 for the county already, and I plan to incorporate those at the end of the year. Given that it often takes a year or two for record cards to make their way to us, it seems likely that we will end up with over 20,000 for the whole year. This compares well with any recording period in the last 500 years.
Alex Lockton
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New species and important finds remain gratifyingly few, so our recent Flora remains fairly accurate five years after publication. I do update the species accounts with name changes, significant new finds and additional species. Most of the latter are of course neophytes – garden escapes that have become more-or-less established in the wild. I do not include garden plants that have been found in gardens, even if self-sown. You can get a copy of the current species accounts from members of the committee. All our data remains fully available to anyone who wants it. The easiest source is probably the NBN Atlas, which allows various types of searches and downloads. Unfortunately, it lacks a few of our species which have new, Stace 4, names, because the NBN does not yet recognise them; but this will undoubtedly be resolved before too long. Other ways to get the data are from the BSBI, the Shropshire Ecological Data Network website, or just by asking a member of the committee. If any members want to do any recording, the easiest way is now to input your records to iRecord, online. Using Mapmate or an Excel spreadsheet are acceptable alternatives.