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

Quality Control

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. These data have not been verified using the NBN Record Cleaner as verification rules for these species are currently unavailable. Much of these data have been digitised from paper records with a validation procedure in place and so should reflect the original records.

Method steps

1. 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. These data are not verified, but as this is a collation of commissioned surveys by professional surveyors and Scottish Wildlife Trust staff, it is felt these data should be reliable.

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.