I dont just take pictures of species of Wildlife, nature and the natural world. when im out wildlife watching and share them with people I also record the species iv seen by sending them off to my county recorder usualy with photos but if identifiable without a photo without. but a photo acompanying a observation is usualy the prefered option with alot of county recorders and recording schemes.
when it comes to effect of the actual recording of wildlife in biological recording there are of cause ups and downs like with most things. the ups of recording wildlife is that it helps county recorders and recording schemes record biodiversity and helps them map out there current distributions. weather it has changed or not or still pretty much the same and what species are changeing distribution amd what species hasnt and it can help with conservation. exspecialy the recording of either new and undiscovered species or just rare or endangered species. plus people can discover a species new to scence with or without being aware if there lucky when twkeing photos and/or recording.
the downs however is that some species are well recorded but some are not so some go under recorded. and there is a couple of reasons for this some species of wildlife are more popular with most people than others. for instance butterflys are more popular than moths cause butterflys tend to be colourful whereas most moths are made for camafauge rather than haveing the warning colors butterflys have. then of course there is spiders. spiders are under recorded cause most people dont take an interest in them or are scared of them due to the myths and misconceptions surpunding spiders they were grown up with as children or cause they are hairy. then of course another reason is some species can be easyer to spot thsn others. and another reason some wildlife go under recorded is cause some animals are more popular than others so may prefer to look out for and record birds or mammels rather than less popular ones causeing them to be recorded by county recorders and tecording schemes more than others
there are of course other examples of wildlife that go under recorded aswell. for instance its not just certain familys. some species within a particular family may be more popular in biological recording than others but there are also certain species within certain familys that can be challangeing to identify fir instance certain types of beetles can be easy while others can be more challangeing and in some cases can require looking through a magnifying glass or needing to see if its male or female under a microscope before being reliably seperated from another similar looking species causeing them to be less popular due to being so similar and challangeing to identify for most people causeing those species in that family to be under recorded in biological recording. and therfore resulting in not enough records to get sn ides of distrubtion for county recorders and recording. that and certain species in some familys can be less well known than others
If you know that much. Do you know how the difference between the breeding of Red Necked Phalaropes and Dotterels differ and compare to practically all of the other nesting/breeding of the other UK breeding birds. There may beother similar breeding birds as the Red Necked Phalarope and the Dotterel?
Regards,
Ian.
sorry for the late reply.
I was talkong about interesting things about the ups and downs of biodiversity recording, some records can be easy to identify othetrs not. Challangeing records can be diffucult to get verified depending on how challengeing the species is for identification
with records uncommon or even rare species in particular have to be verified by an exspert as correct or imcorrect regardless of if the subject in the record was correctly identified by you or not before it can even be sent anywhere like the nbn atlas. and depending on the specoes the difficulty of getting it verified varys but can be paricularly difucult with rare or uncommon species
records can get added to the nbn atlas either through i record or the nbm atlas or a county recorder can add it to his database or the nbn atlas.
these days records are kept online somewhere safe but of course keeping things online can also have its ups and downs.
that aside in biological recording there can be the issue of duplicates and this is a common problom on i record that happens ocasionaly. i record can end up with duplicate records due to a scheme called i naturalist cause onservations can get sent from i naturalist to i record and people send the same records to both i natiralist and i record hence the duplicates. i naturalist also has there owm way of doing things that is different to i record there are other schemes that go about things differently though aswell
With county recorders maps that have had records added to them in a database can also become outdated after a couple of years or more since some distributions change and therefore do need to be updated at some point. jist most of the things i mentioned about ups amd downs about biodiversity recording. of course there are othet ups and downs too
if you have any interesting things you know about biodiversity recording feell free to contribute to the thread
how species are recorded by an observer csn give county recorders or recording schemes an idea of species distribution and how well there doimg
some methods used are counting how many of a certain species they see in a given time frame. 15 minutes. half an hour and hour etc others are instead survey based like the breeding bird survey or Butterfly survey even though you can still count the Wildlife you see. you have an alocated area to do it in and if you visit it regularly even better. I dont use this bit some people do.
seek by i naturalist uses AI to identify Wildlife and from there you can send what you have identified to i naturalist and if you get enough agreement it reaches research grade and gets sent to i record. but its not guarntead it will get sent to the nbn atals nesacerily. this gets added to the i naturalist map of the species observations sent by people who sent there records. however there are still mis identificatioms amd those with enough agreements reach research grade even if mis identified. people send there onservations to both there and i record aswell even though its advised not to.
there are of course other recording schemes you can use. records sent from there go to either i record, nbn atlas or the county recorders database. but netherthe less the recording schemes contribute to biological recording either by adding it to there own maps of onservations from others or sending it to the nbn atlas
these gove them an idea of species distributions but obviously not all methods used to record will nesacerily be 100 percent acurate and some species can easily be overlooked
AI Artificial intelegance isnt allways 100 percent acurate. AI uses machine learning it learns from the subject you took a picture of in the images that you send and ask for identification for in order to record. it learns through recognition and repetatation. it may know a certain number of species or alot but may not mecacerily be able to recognise every single one that and might have some gaps in knoledge aswell. it gets better at recogniseing species over time but may need to learn new ones so it can get things wrong. same goes for AI that is used to recognise bird calls. in both cases the machine is still learning.
second some maps arnt 100 percent acurate like the a map may give you an idea of where a species is. like a colour covering scotland or england for a certain species but it only gives you a general idea. whereas others may cover a species distribution and where to find them in more detail instead.
as for adding species to maps for recording species and mapping when it comes to rare species and adding observations to maps in some cases it might be advised to not make it visable on a map for conservation purposes
So are you saying you are right. There are lots of individuals whove volunteered and done all of that for years as volunteers plus some professionals as well! I’m wondering have you yourself tried to do all of that. Some of the work by the BTO takes days weeks months and years etc. So are you saying you know more than some of the volunteers and also have you taken part in doing that yourself! Sometimes these surveys are done in finite detail. Have you read the last book about the last National survey of birds which is about 800+ pages long by the BTO in the UK and have you read that book from start to finish. It was well done from volunteers doing a top job at surveying over a long period of time and I mean years. They do an excellent thorough and detailed job in great detail’ and I do admire what they do!
no im not saying anything about the people and there knoledge about surveying. just the diffetent types of recording systems and how they work and the natural ups and downs of biological recording that comes with biological recordimg and interesting things about it. what you said is one of the pros of biological recording. there are of course other pros aswell though.
observations and recording Wildlife can help give people an idea of how populations are doing and of course cause a distributions and trends can change over many years records in the long term can help build a picture of population trends and how there doing conservation wise. and weather it has changed much or not. but some species are easily overlooked or under recorded which is for many reasons.so I wasnt saying its the result of efforts or knowledge about surveying.
i record is a good example of the ups and downs of Wildlife recording. it doesnt allways have a county recorder for a certain taxa. sometimes they need a recorder for i record sometimes they dont. it does have alot though. even though they have some for most. spiders an under recorded taxa was mainly done by the aracnological society seperatly and hadnt joined i record. wasnt part of i record and i record didnt acept most spider records most had to be verified by the recordimg scheme or county recorder directly cause they can be diffucult to identify
but the pro is that now recently the aracnological society have joined i record and are part of i record now and so acept records there too which should help the taxa recording wise
www.bto.org/.../bird-tracking
Instead of doing lines and lines of typing trying to explain like you do. I’ve typed out a link with a few lines and how the BTO do there survey work. As far as spiders you can do that if you so wish. This is about bird tracking another way without the need the storage iof the internet.
i do send links on my posts(if and when ) I need to sometimes. but I usualy prefer not to and I find it easyer to exsplain things in detail. .im not discussing that any further cause it has nothing to do with biological recording. moving on. the rest of what you said is relevent to the topic so il respond to that instead.
I didnt say anything about how I record spiders.
theres a recording scheme called (i record) i record is a good example of the ups and downs of Wildlife recording. it doesnt allways have a county recorder for a certain taxa.
sometimes they need a recorder for i record sometimes they dont. it does have alot of them though.
spiders an under recorded taxa was mainly done by the aracnological society seperatly and hadnt joined i record.
so it wasnt part of i record and i record didnt acept most spider records
most had to be verified by the recordimg scheme or county recorder directly cause they can be diffucult to identify
but the pro(up) is that now recently the aracnological society have joined i record and are part of i record now and so acept records there too which should help the taxa recording wise
just thought I would clear things up.
i used to send my records on i record but I dont anymore. I prefer the county recorder. nothing about the ups and downs of biological recording is about me or how I record. the ups and downs are just to do with biological recording
yes theres offline methods aswell. there are (also) methods that record Wildlife offline( aswell as online. ) whicj is good considering the ups and dowms of recording online.
inivatably I know the ups and downs of biological recording just like anyone else who have done biological recording like me aswell. it is about the ups and downs that come woth biological recording. i record was used as an example