Recorder supports Admin areas in two ways. Firstly, you can give a location an admin area and use that. Secondly, you can add  admin areas to a sample. The admin area table is fairly extensive. If you think anything is missing let us know.  The tables are  Location_Admin_Areas and Sample_Admin_Area. You can see what is available in Dictionaies/Admin Area Browser.   This is a system supplied table so adding to it via SQL Server could stop other parts of the applications working.   

The preferred list for birds is the British Ornithologists Union British List (Categories A,B,C). You can add species to existing list, but not add complete new lists. Adding additional taxa will not affect upgrades.

It would be safer if you didn't add your own  entries to the Admin table. If they were genuine Admin Area, then they coudl be added centrally for you. However, if you just want to add categories for reporting purposes the you could use Measurements or Features. The simplest is probaby to use a 'Measurement' . Measurements can be anything you want and don't have to be length area etc..  Add these via the Term List.

A bit puzzled by your response Mike. I have successfully added several items to the Admin_areas table. Particularly I have added all the community areas for Wiltshire and Locality areas for Swindon to our copy (recorder still has parishes and districts - the latter of which no longer exist in unitary Wiltshire - but not community areas, against which we must report). It has not caused any unexpected problems since I made the changes a couple of years ago.

I don't see any reason why a competent person who is familar with the structure of the R6 db and with the generalities of SQLServer databases, should not be able to do this. But I appreciate that an untutored person might create problems for themselves.

The items I have entered all have us as custodian and primary keys beginning with our site ID and the system supplied flag is set to 0, so there is no reason why these would conflict with any future updates. It is important to note though that I also added records to Admin_Type as categories to contain the items I added to admin_areas. So I have a parent category called Community and Locality areas, with two child categories (on for each type) and I used the admin_type_keys of these when populating admin_areas.Admin_type_key.

It is also worth mentioning that ADMIN_AREAS and ADMIN_TYPE both occur in the Last_Key table, which would not be necessary if no additional entries were to be allowed?

The entries display precisely as expected in the Admin area dictionary browser and in the Geo Info tab of the locations hierarchy. I use them daily without problem. Of course I would not advocate adding any items within any of the existing admin types as these may be subject to unannounced change.

Also on the subject of adding a bird species. If it isn't on any of the lists but is a genuinely occurring species, then it should be added nationally to one of the lists, ideally the BOU one. Would it not be better to post the details to Chris on the species dictionary section and see what he thinks about getting it added.

The main thing is that an R6 Export will not pick up the added Amin Areas so the import into another system will reject the Location Admin Area.  Normally, user added entries are exported  with the data, but this doesn't happen with this table. Also the table is centrally maintained, with no provision for users to add there own entries, so an update at sometime could possibly delete any user added entries - although now we are aware that they are being added, this should not be the case.

Having thought about this a bit more deeply,  there is an advantage in using Admin Area to analyse Location information by category in that is that you can use this in the Report Wizard.  The Report Wizard doesn't support filters on Features or Measurements.  There is no harm in adding Admin Areas and there is some advantage in them not being exported, especially if you using them for some local analysis.

Thanks Mike.

And Robin, I have incorporated quite a lot of minor additions of this kind to R6, but I would, of course caution that you make sure you are absolutely familar with the structure before making any changes, and always take a backup & test rigorously.