Hi Charles

Serotine is one of the more obvious examples of a species being out of order in the dictionary if you use the Recommended Taxon Sort Order.  I have only recently tracked down a likely cause but had not had the time to report it.  My investigations within the latest dictionary version J, show that the preferred list for Serotine is actually the 'JNCC collation of taxon designations' rather than MAMMALIA.  This means that Serotine ends up with a sort order value which comes after all the other species on the MAMMALIA checklist  This is also the case for Egyptian Goose from the BIRDS, and there are also examples of taxa from the BEETLES, HETEROPTERA, FUNGI and LICHEN, etc checklists.

If there is someone reading this who can pursue this issue, the SQL query I have used to do this has come across over 2000 TLIKs where although they are from one of the preferred checklists, the preferred list comes out as being the 'JNCC collation of taxon designations', 'List of additional names', or the old 'Recorder 3.3', 'Ulster Museum...' lists and several others.  For some of the species there is probably a valid reason why this may be the case but for the majority I would suspect not.

I find that the poor taxonomic order within many of the checklists remains as one of the major letdowns of Recorder 6, although so much else has improved recently and I am generally happy with much of what it can now do.  As a record centre which holds records across all groups, but for which the source of the majority of the data is plant surveys, the alphabetical ordering of species within alphabetical genera for the VASCULAR PLANT and BRYOPHYTE checklists is particularly annoying.

Another point which I have recently come across; now that there are checklists for ACULEATES, ICHNEUMONIDAE and SYMPHYTA to cover the Hymenoptera, there is considerable overlap between the sort orders for the three groups which produces a most unsatisfactory mixing up of species, rather than them being in distinct blocks.

Alison Stewart
Environmental Database Manager
Dorset Environmental Records Centre

Seconded. We export our reports to Excel for tidying, and it does get a bit tedious trying to swap records around to a sensible order (I usually just correct the most glaring errors).

Two years later we are still having to check output sorted by recommended taxon sort order and Serotines and Egyptian Geese are still not coming out in the right place. Has anything been done about this problem?