Non-native-bird records from county bird reports, 1995-2009
British Trust for Ornithology
Description
These are records of bird species non-native to Britain that were published in county bird reports for the years since 1995.
Geographic Description
Great Britain and the Isle of Man
Purpose
BTO is helping to build a GB Non-native Species Information Portal on the Defra web site. The portal will draw upon NBN data for distribution maps at 10-km resolution. The purpose of data capture was therefore to improve the quality of distribution maps for non-native birds in GB.
Data quality
Confidence in species identification rests with the editors of the various reports. Most report editors are assisted by records committees who validate records of scarce species. Records committees have only rarely validated records of non-native species, however, and many records have been published just on the word of the observers. Many non-native birds seen in GB are simple to identify but some require a good knowledge of similar species on a global scale. A further difficulty is that some cage birds have been bred or hybridised for many generations in the pet or livestock trades and may no longer resemble any wild-type species. BTO has checked the allocation of grid references to records but some errors may remain; for some large sites, the grid reference given is a central one and may be too precise for some of the records reported. BTO is also responsible for matching species names given in original published reports to an NBN-listed taxon, and for standardising site names across reports and years.
Methods
BTO staff and volunteers extracted the records from published reports in the Chris Mead Library at BTO headquarters in Thetford. Grid-references, rarely available in the original published reports, have been added by BTO using maps and look-up tables.
Citation
British Trust for Ornithology ([Insert download year]). Non-native-bird records from county bird reports, 1995-2009. Occurrence dataset on the NBN Atlas
Rights
CC-BY-NC
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Digitised records
Looking up... the number of records that can be accessed through the NBN Atlas. This resource was last checked for updated data on 24 Nov 2022. The most recent data was published on 09 May 2018.
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