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Forum → UK Species Inventory / Dictionary → NERC & CRoW Acts
Is there an intention to produce Species Lists for the NERC Act (Section 41) and CRoW Act (section 71) to enable selection by these two lists?
Craig Slawson
Staffordshire Ecological Record
Hi Craig,
The NERC Act will be included as a separate list (and also within the JNCC collation of designations) in the next release of the species dictionary (end of July/early August hopefully). I'm not sure about the CRoW Act - Charles may be able to answer this question.
Lynn
Craig,
Could you clarify how CRoW Section 71 (Reports on rights of way functions) impacts on taxa in the Species Dictionary? What exactly do you require?
Charles Hussey
I think it is CRoW Act section 74 that Craig meant, but my understanding is that CroW section 74 states there is a duty to publish a list of species of principal importance, i.e. the list that was subsequently published in NERC Act section 41 - the CRoW Act does not contain any additional list itself.
Martin
Well I have just finished adding the NERC Section 41 and CCW Section 42 lists to the Dictionary and they will be in teh next Recorder update.
Regards,
Charles Hussey
I think I may have found a bit of a problem with the NERC s.41 dictionary list. I have recently been asked to produce a list of all NERC spp within the county and have discovered that a number of bird species known to occur in the county are missing from the list e.g. linnet, skylark, lesser spotted woodpecker. It seems to be that they are missing because the Recorder 6 NERC list specifies one particular subspecies, which for species such as Skylark didnt exist in the Recorder 2002 dictionary (Alauda arvensis subsp arvensis).
I have spoken to an active bird recorder and the regional BTO recorder and neither of them have recorded such birds to subspecies level therefore I am in a bit of a quandary because I won't be able to use just the NERC list in future, I will also have to find out all of the birds species that are missing and carry out a secondary search as well (I am also concerned that the same issue will affect other species groups). I realise that whoever created the list for Recorder used the official list created by Natural England which only specifies certain subspecies but I am confused as to why Natural England have been so specific when most recorders are not. In particular it is also interesting to note that they have only inlcuded Alauda arvensis subsp arvensis and not subsp scotia.
Does anyone have any ideas why only certain subspecies have been included on the official list?
Regards,
Jenni
I assume it would be for the same reason that you get these problems for birds on the UK BAP Priority 2007 list and is probably based on the same list. As I understand it for some species only the subspecies representing the UK populations (resident/breeding/overwintering? dependent on species) were included in the BAP list. Unfortunately no-one records against these subspecies. Possibly even worse is that you could record either Carduelis cannabina subsp. autochthona or Carduelis cannabina subsp. cannabina on the BIRDS list if the suspecies has been determined, but would not be picked up by a search against the Priority List (2007), which has Carduelis cannabina subsp. autochthona/cannabina which wouldn't match to either (using Priority as example as havent upgraded dictionaries yet). Similar examples for corn bunting, twite, skylark and marsh tit.
Has been mentioned a few times, but can't remember if a solution is on the way. I expect people probably work around it with a rucksack.
Gordon
Oh dear it does seem to be quite an issue. Hopefully in the future lists can be drawn up in conjunction with people/groups from the recording community so that problems such as this can be reduced.
Jenni
In cases where there can be little ambiguity as to what was originally recorded; that is, the original recorder only recorded the taxon at species level but we know that the taxon is actually highly likely to be the sub-species found in the BAP/NERC lists, then I am considering updating the determinations of those species to be sub-species specific. Adding a new determination in this fashion is non-destructive (i.e., you're not permanently removing old data), you can add a note and a level of confidence. Improving the data in this way is a worthwhile activity if you do actually have the time and resources to do it. These decisions can be made with local experts and can be applied to the database via batch update.
Obviously, this is difficult to do when a species could be one of two or more sub-species. No clear solution presents itself in this case, but the simplest thing to do would probably be to edit the dictionary using the dictionary editor and add the determinations you need to the taxon in question, then use the Designation Sets report wizard feature to do your reporting against the designation rather than the checklist.
I would favour a change to the dictionaries, as this would presumably also feed through to the NBN Gateway where you get the same reporting problem. I am slightly concerned whether creating a new determination that fits with the BAP (and presumably NERC) checklist would then prevent those records from appearing in a query run against the BIRDS checklist as there is no synonomy. Still slightly wary of batch updates, but wouldn't want to manually add deteminations for all ~1000 occurences I have of the 5 species mentioned above, let alone however many there are in the non-aggregated sub-species.
Also this would be a much less efficient process, in that anyone that wants to report on these species needs to run the update on their own database and continually check afterwards that nothing else has snuck in. This still would not solve the problem on the Gateway where you may be more likely to have people that are unaware of these issues trying to run queries.
Trying to explain this to someone else I have just come across the Species and Habitat Review Report 2007 which under the table for birds includes the following footnote for skylark, linnet, corn bunting and marsh tit (with several similar footnotes for others)
2. These two races include all UK birds and for practical purposes they are listed together.
Definition of practical here referring to saving a few lines in a report rather than preventing a major headache for anyone attempting to use the list later on.
I think that line would justify an amendment to the dictionaries.
Gordon
Bumping this for Chris's attention after mentioning these sort of issues at the ALERC meeting. THere are a few earlier topics on the subject, but I think this summarises things.
Hi Gordon, Thanks for highlighting this - I will read over the posts and see what we can do about the problem :)
Rebumping following Craig raising this issue again elsewhere re S41
Hi Gordon - thanks for giving me a nudge on this one. Apologies for not looking at it sooner, it had slipped my mind and dropped down on my list of enquiries so I had missed it.
Morning,
Can I raise this issue up your list of enquiries again.
Thanks
Rob
Hello,
We upgraded our version of Recorder 6 on Wednesday with the latest revisions.
This issue still hasn't been fixed. Just thought I'd raise it up your list..
Thanks
Rob
Hi Rob - let me forward this to the JNCC as they maintain the designatory checklists. I think this hot potato has been doing the rounds for ages and it's unclear whether this should be a change to the data or whether it needs changes to the reports.
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