Gloucestershire Historic Wildlife Sightings prior to 1st Jan 2000

Quality Control

Medium. All records are checked as they are entered, and again after entry, and the majority have come from expert determiners such as County Recorders or other experienced naturalists. Note, however, that some records date from sources which didn’t have current standards of biological recording, including old record cards and documents which have had to go through a translation process from paper to computerised records. Interpretation of handwritten records can introduce errors. An effort has been made to remove an doubtful records wherever possible. Users should bear in mind that, whilst it is possible to validate records as to species name, broad geographic location, date type and expected species distribution, no Local Records Centre can verify all sightings as true. We rely on both the honesty and accuracy of recorders, but cannot rule out instances of either deliberate or accidental mis-identification. Given the high levels of checking both before and after record-entry, and the frequent use of expert determiners, we are confident that such records will be minimal and unlikely to affect the integrity of the dataset as a whole. The original Recorder 6 report was exported using the NBN Export Format Addin, which runs basic validation checks prior to writing the export. Of the records successfully exported, a small proportion failed the NBN Record Cleaner check, all due to “Unknown Taxon Verson Key”. As this is an internal dictionary problem rather than an error with the records themselves, those records cannot be updated by GCER at this stage. Users should bear in mind that such records will be missing from our dataset on the NBN until suitable dictionary upgrades have taken place. Apart from this factor, all the records in this dataset have passed the NBN Record Cleaner validation.

Method steps

1. Various, depending on the survey methods involved. Records in this dataset are predominantly field sightings, but also include bat detector records, systematic trapping surveys eg. for birds or great crested newts, and occasional records of dead animals, or parts, signs, droppings or pellets. The majority of the data has been collated from records which have already been entered onto an electronic database or spreadsheet, e.g. a MapMapmate import. Less frequently, records will have been typed in from handwritten cards or survey notes. Some records are from online sources. All sources of records are checked before entry onto our main database (Recorder 6), and double-checked to ensure the data entry was correct.

The records all relate to the administrative county of Gloucestershire unless they relate to a site overlapping the border, in which case there may be some “stray” records near the borders with Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Monmouthshire, and South Gloucestershire. Such records will generally relate to sightings within 1km of the Gloucestershire border. Note that “South Gloucestershire” does not lie within the administrative county of Gloucestershire: it is a separate Unitary Authority. For records relating to South Gloucestershire please refer to the datasets provided by Bristol Regional Environmental Records Centre (BRERC).