1 Topic by Darwyn Sumner

  • Darwyn Sumner
  • Darwyn Sumner
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  • From: Dipterists Forum
  • Registered: 10-05-2006
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Topic: Using Recorder 6 outside the UK

How much interest is there in this?
Mike Weideli tells me that there are some, I used it for work which finished up as a brief presentation at the NFBR conference "Think globally, record locally effective biological recording at the scale needed" and of course there's the German version of R6.

Issues relating to R6 usage outside the UK were not covered by the recent survey so if you do use it in this way please reply to this thread.

Here's a handful of notes and observations:
1. There's been an increasing trend towards providing georeferenced locations to species occurrences in papers published by European authors in recent years.
2. Recorder 6 handles the location hierarchy well, just flip from OSGR to Lat/Long and perhaps augment with Google Earth searches.
3. Simply output a report with lat/long columns to a csv and you've got your European distribution in QGIS
4. Non-UK species dictionaries are slightly problematic but feasible
5. No basic outline map for Europe in R6

If the Recorder 6 consortium are to develop it in the future then it would be handy to know if it's not just me. One or two small tweaks and it could be sold abroad.

2 Reply by clareblencowe

  • clareblencowe
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Re: Using Recorder 6 outside the UK

Thanks for raising this Darwyn. Just to say Recorder 6 is used on the Isle of Man, and the Manx Biological Recording Partnership is actively engaged in considering next steps, following the consultation.

Sally Rankin told me that Recorder 6 was deployed at one time in the Falklands (many years ago) as well as Jersey and Republic of Ireland, but I don't think it's still in active use in those places.

Clare Blencowe
Sussex Biodiversity Record Centre | Manager
Recorder 6 Steering Group | Chair

clareblencowe's Website

3 Reply by Darwyn Sumner (edited by Darwyn Sumner 15-04-2018 18:52:51)

  • Darwyn Sumner
  • Darwyn Sumner
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Re: Using Recorder 6 outside the UK

Perhaps I should have specified [outside the] British Isles. Better still the areas not covered by the OS National grid: “British Isles minus Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and the Channel Islands”
Isle of Man is within the OS National Grid so current R6 functionality is the same as for anyone.
There is some Northern Ireland & Republic of Ireland functionality currently built in to R6 and there are recorders recording there (perhaps seen more by NSSs) Rich Burkmar's TomBio tools for QGIS features a guide to creating maps there to the "Ordnance Survey Ireland" National Grid so someone must have asked FSC about mapping there (in fact I've done work on millipede distribution there in the past.)
Channel Islands are a long time problem for Recorder due to their being outside the OS National Grid.
Again NSSs are recording there, Steve Falk's recent bee book for example features species from there as they are part of the British Isles.
I don't pretend to know exactly how Syrph the Net manages its species occurrences but Martin Speight and Cédric Vanappelghem are producing Hoverfly Atlases in France (https://app.box.com/s/vp1krc9c64uchrcozu0xagjqo01udn0f) and I've seen several other distribution mapping initiatives in Europe (well, count GBIF itself as one, garnish with Fauna Europaea and sprinkle in some iSpot projects)

Many NSSs have a Europe remit, all of the 22 schemes in Dipterists Forum for a start. Interest in using R6 across the channel is what I'm seeking out here, ornithologists, botanists and lepidopterists ...