CMS (the Conservation Management System) is a database used for conservation management plans, for creating the plan and recording work done against the plan. When CMS7 was released in 2005, we put in a table that allowed the user to link a CMS site to multiple Recorder locations using the recorder dsn. This allowed a species list to be included in the management plan with the data coming directly out of Recorder. The other place the user could link into Recorder was at the survey event level linking from an annual project report in CMS. This allows the user to link to the records generated for a specific project which might be the result of a monitoring project or whatever.

We have now extended this with the 2007 annual maintenance release and put in a simple biological recording interface. This is not intended to replace Recorder but instead to act as a data capture tool for conservation managers who do not have Recorder or MapMate. Far too often were we coming across site managers who were seeing important species but not logging them. There are tools included in CMS that will then export the data to Recorder and MapMate so it will be interesting to see if records are fed through to LRCs and National Schemes and Societies via this route.

Reporting in CMS uses Crystal Reports which allows us to produce a site species list summarizing data that may be held in both sources (CMS and Recorder).

We have some web demos of this in action at www.esdm.co.uk/cms and go to the demos section.