Commissioned surveys and staff surveys and reports for Scottish Wildlife Trust reserves - Unassessed data

Scottish Wildlife Trust

Description

This dataset comprises species recorded on Scottish Wildlife Trust reserves through individual surveys commissioned or undertaken by the Trust. Records in this dataset are for species which at the time of upload cannot be verified using the NBN Record Cleaner as verification rules for the given species are currently unavailable.

The majority of this data will be from 2000 onwards, as this more recent data has been the focus of efforts to digitise Scottish Wildlife Trust records. In some cases however, there will be data from as far back as 1964 when the Trust was created, or even earlier where records were passed over with the land.

A surge in surveying for 2000-2005 coincided with an Heritage Lottery Fund funded project to enhance Scottish Wildlife Trust reserves.

Geographic Description

The records will be restricted to Scottish Wildlife Trust reserves as this reflects the nature of the recording/surveying commissioned by the Trust. There may be biases in the data towards reserves with more resources or higher levels of public use. Some of the records will be collected with 6-10 figure grid references, whilst others may have been recorded at the reserve level only - where this was the case, a central grid reference for the reserve was used.

Purpose

The records were originally collected to aid reserve management and so will be reserve focused and focus on species or habitats of interest locally.

Data quality

Surveys have been undertaken on an ad-hoc basis where a particular need or gap in the knowledge of a reserve arose. The surveys included in this dataset have been professionally commissioned or completed through Scottish Wildlife Trust itself and so are assumed to be of a high standard. This data has not been verified using the NBN Record Cleaner as verification rules for these species are currently unavailable. Much of this data has been digitised from paper records with a validation procedure in place and so should reflect the original records.

Methods

As this is a collated dataset from multiple surveys (undertaken by professional surveyors or Scottish Wildlife Trust staff), data collection methods are listed in the survey level metadata. This data is not verified, but as this is a collation of commissioned surveys by professional surveyors and Scottish Wildlife Trust staff, it is felt this data should be reliable.

Citation

No citation information available.

Rights

CC-BY

Data generalisations

This data is provided "as is" and Scottish Wildlife Trust do not have the resources to interpret this data. The Trust would recommend using a Local Record Centre for interpretation purposes and to gain a clear picture of all datasets available, many of which will not yet be on the NBN Gateway.

Information withheld

Access to records for species considered sensitive by Scottish Natural Heritage is restricted for the following reason: Some of the information held within this dataset relates to species that are vulnerable to human disturbance or prejudice. At this time the data provider believes that full disclosure to the public would lead to environmental harm. This sensitive information may be made available (through taxon based regional datasets) under licence to specific organisations and individuals that need to know to avoid harm to the environment.

Digitised records

Metadata last updated on 2018-07-02 16:27:08.0