Black-throated Diver annual records in North Scotland, 1834-2010

Royal Society for the Protection of Birds

Description

This dataset pulls together all available information from a wide range of sources to give a single line summary for each Black-throated Diver breeding territory in North Scotland Region in each year for which information is available. Principal sources of information are the RSPB annual monitoring program and records submitted for inclusion in the Highland Bird Report. Other data was sourced from NTS, SNH, SWT, RBBP and Forestry Commission amongst others. Much of the pre-1985 data comes from a historical dataset compiled by Greg Mudge in the early 1990s that sourced many museum collections etc. In the case of multi-territory lochs, some historical data just refers to the whole loch and does not indicate which territory the record is from. In such cases, a separate entry is made like 'loch name' consolidated. The inclusion of a site in this dataset does not neccesarily mean that it is a known breeding site. Some sites are included for future reference as a pair has been noted present in the egg laying period (27 April to 15 June).

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The dataset has been split into two different surveys, one contains data from egg collection (Records from egg collection), and the other contains the records from annual surveys (Records from annual surveys).

Geographic Description

The dataset contains data from North Scotland Region. The majority of the records are at 1km resolution. Some of the records are available, at 100m, and some at 10m resolution.

Data quality

Good quality data, completely checked for typographic errors and geographic integrity.

Methods

The dataset has been split into two surveys, on account of their different recording methods.

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The Records from egg collection survey contains most of the historical egg collection data and some more recent egg collection records. Most of these records come from museum collections.

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Records from annual surveys is the more recent part of the dataset. This part of the dataset is a combination of different surveys undertaken and casual birdwatching records. Information on this can be found in the Occupancy Survey and Productivity Survey column, which are explained here:

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Occupancy Survey = Yes means that the territory was specifically surveyed for Black-throated Divers. No in this column means that the information came from casual observations whilst engaged in other survey work or from observers engaged in casual birdwatching. To qualify as Yes, either breeding was confirmed on an early visit, or the territory was surveyed on at least three seperate days between 27 April and 15 June (the extreme dates for which we know eggs have been laid).

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Productivity Survey = Yes in this column means that the territory was visited at least once after 15 June specifically to search for Black-throated Diver chicks. No in this column means that the information comes from casual observations, whilst engaged in other survey work or from casual birdwatching.

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The raft codes were inserted for all entries for any site where a raft has ever been used, this explains why is there a raft code in the "Raft Code" column, and "no" in the "raft available" column in some cases.

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Site Code = This gives a unique site code for each territory. A territory may consist of a whole loch, part of a loch or a group of lochs

Citation

Please acknowledge Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), National Trust for Scotland (NTS), Scottish Wildlife Trust (SWT), Rare Breeding Bird Panel (RBBP), Forestry Commission Scotland (FCS) and Museum Collections in any use of the data.

Rights

CC-BY

Digitised records

Metadata last updated on 2017-06-16 13:56:58.0