Gloucestershire Naturalists' Society Spider Records 1930 - 2013

Gloucestershire Centre for Environmental Records

Description

These records are derived from a set of handwritten record cards left to Gloucestershire Naturalists' Society by the late David John Russell Haigh, County Spider Recorder for Gloucestershire. The records are almost all for field observations of spiders which were present during survey events; casual records of zero abundance were very rare in the record card collection and have not been included in the NBN dataset. The record cards date from some notable early 20th century historic records through to decades of David Haigh's own observations from the 1960s up to 2013, and records which he collated from other spider recorders.

Scanned images of the original cards are available from the image hyperlinks included in the uploaded data under the attribute heading "associatedMedia"

Geographic Description

These records are almost all located within the administrative county of Gloucestershire; a few are just outside the border or in South Gloucestershire.

Purpose

This dataset represents a lifetime of spider recording by David Haigh and his friends and associates. It was computerised from a collection of scanned record cards by GCER with the kind support of a grant from Gloucestershire Naturalists' Society.

Data quality

The standard of identification skills amongst the recorders in this dataset would be of the highest, as David Haigh was an expert and would consult other national experts if in doubt. Records were largely legible and with very few spelling or grid reference inconsistencies, however there may still be some inconsistencies resulting from interpretation of the original handwriting. The latter have hopefully been corrected where a correct version is known; spelling of placenames may however still be inconsistent in places and/or use locally colloquial placenames rather than the Ordnance Survey map versions.

Methods

Record cards were scanned, records deciphered and entered by volunteers, graded as to how confident they were about record transcription quality and then all checked by a different volunteer or member of GCER staff. The whole dataset was then subjected to a range of quality checks by GCER staff, including grid reference construction, placename consistency and removal of any records which were too doubtful or vague to include in the database (eg those with no date).

Citation

GCER (2021). 1930-2013 Spider Records, Gloucestershire, England. Digitised from the handwritten card archive of the late County Spider Recorder David John Russell Haigh, with both expert and financial support from Gloucestershire Naturalists' Society. Occurrence dataset on the NBN Atlas.

Rights

Database rights: Gloucestershire Centre for Environmental Records

Digitised records