For the last few months we have been working with the GLNP to produce a way to enter GBS records on line. We now have a website set up for this purpose, and we need as many people as possible to test it and provide feedback. If you are currently taking part in GBS, please therefore give it a go! Please access the online form at
http://record.glnp.org.uk and use this in addition to the paper form for the rest of this winter, submitting the hard copy as usual at the end of the current period. The reasons for asking you to do the two in parallel are that at present, the online form doesn’t allow you to:
a) record whether food has been put out, or
b) add new species.
Both of these are allowed on the hard copy form of course, and you should continue to use this form as before.
For the next version we are intending to provide a fixed set of 60 species which we should be able to monitor through the year. The great advantage of this method is that all calculations are done automatically by the program, so not only is it faster to calculate the indices, but it will allow more extensive analyses to be produced. These monitoring data will be included in the species accounts in the Bird Report as soon as we’ve ironed out any issues. If we can get a big enough uptake, and given that the program also records exactly where the records come from, separate indices might even be possible in time for different parts of the county.
At the moment the program is just on the GLNP website, but the data will come to us, and once we are ‘go’ it will also run on the LBC website. Other organisations will be invited to add it to their own websites if they wish: the eventual target is 500 surveyors county-wide! But all that depends on getting it right now, so do please go to
http://record.glnp.org.uk and get started.
Anne Goodall
Biodiversity Officer
LBC