Wider Countryside Butterfly Scheme (WCBS)

Biological Records Centre

Description

The Wider Countryside Butterfly Survey is part of the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (UKBMS). The WCBS is a standarised monitoring scheme for monitoring widespread butteflies in the UK. It is based on sampling along transects within 1km squares selected at random across the UK (stratified by BTO or BC regional networks). The WCBS is run by Butterfly Conservation (BC), the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), and the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), in partnership with the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC), and supported and steered by Forestry Commission (FC), Natural England (NE), Natural Resources Wales (NRW), Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA) and Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH).

Geographic Description

UK.

Purpose

As part of a national monitoring programme for butterflies.

Data quality

Confidence in the data is good. Automatic rules are used to classify some records as 'assumed correct'; other records are reviewed by expert verifiers.

Methods

The In the WCBS, BC recorders are allocated randomly selected 1km squares within the county in which they live, whilst BTO recorders are given the opportunity to survey their existing Breeding Bird Survey squares. Both sets of surveyors are asked to survey these squares at least twice over the July and August period with visits spaced ten days apart. Optional visits are encouraged, especially in the spring to sample Orange-tip and for the first generation of bivoltine species. On each visit, recorders survey two parallel 1km survey lines evenly spaced ca300m apart. Along the survey lines, recorders count butterflies, day-flying moths and dragonflies using the same time of day, recording width and weather condition criteria used in transect monitoring. Due to the low level of sampling effort (and unlike conventional transects), WCBS data is not used to derive local measures of butterfly abundance.

Citation

No citation information available.

Rights

CC-BY-NC

Digitised records

Metadata last updated on 2017-06-16 13:58:49.0