SER Species-based Surveys

Staffordshire Ecological Record

Description

This dataset covers records supplied to SER as part of organised Species-based surveys, either for single species or taxonomic groups. In most cases the data collection has been administered by the taxon-interest group within the County.

Geographic Description

The majority of the records in the dataset are within Modern Staffordshire, however, there is a significant proportion for the historical Vice-county 39 which also includes parts of the Black Country and Birmingham. A small proportion also come for the 'edges' of the adjacent counties when the presence outside the county could be relevant to the potential within Staffordshire (e.g. very mobile species such as birds).

Data is held at varying precision, 100m precision or better is preferred by SER, however, much is supplied at 1km precision and some old literary records are only assignable to 10km squares.

Purpose

The majority of the data collection is for monitoring the distribution of the species across Staffordshire, either directly in the case of the Mammals Group, which recently (2007) produced a County Atlas from the data, to indirectly in the case of the Bat Group, where much of the data derives from roost visits required under law.

Data quality

Most of the data has been inputted by the local expert in the relevant group so this should be adequately validated, however, grid references for early records and publically supplied data have often been inferred to the best knowledge of the collator. The data has not be checked using the NBN Record Cleaner.

Methods

The data are primarily collected by the taxon-interest groups involved with each survey and hence survey techniques various depending on the species involved, however, the majority are based upon general field observations. The bulk of the records are then collated by the taxon-interest group and verified prior to supply to SER. Bat Group and Mammal Group records are also computerised by the relevant groups using MapMate prior to supply to SER. These MapMate data are subsequently transferred into Recorder 6 at SER.

Citation

Staffordshire Ecological Record ([Insert download year]). SER Species-based Surveys. Occurrence dataset on the NBN Atlas

Rights

CC-BY-NC

Digitised records