The Record Pool

Even with the large icons I can identify dozens of sites from your earlier pictures. Though you are obviously very happy with it all. Your posts today just illustrate why I wouldn't pass my records into the system, if you had posted up any of my monitoring sites in that level of detail on here I would have been extremely upset about it. Rob has mentioned before collection at EF - that picture of yours should help them a lot!

You describe the last one as a 'risky' shot - well yest it is really considering it can be identified as an area to the east of Hockley Woods near Hawkwell in about 30 seconds on Google Earth.

I do hope Chris deletes all your posts today and has a serious word with you about posting this information from the record pool on the internet..... exactly the sort of reason I would NOT submit my records to it.

It would mean having an acceptable level of detail on public maps - though of course no information is completely safe from being found through computers.

Will be going through how this can work through local groups and landowners etc....

J

That is the same story at many sites I work at Jon. Neglect of woodlands is perhaps the biggest enemy at sites not threatened by development. The public do not like tree clearance, which makes it difficult to achieve, it also costs money. It is often a case of identifying areas that will be quickly recolonised by reptiles or in some cases even still harbour remnant populations and working very hard to see that the work is done. At several sites I am down to identifying individual trees that can either be crown lifted or coppiced over several seasons so the public do not see a sudden impact at the site. This will at least stop increased shading. The other issue is what to do with the wood? Many land managers want to sell it to offset the cost of felling, a shame as it is much better left in-situ as log and brash piles forming almost instant habitat.

Steve has been displaying species diversity on maps so that areas can be targeted for survey work to get further confirmed records. Using unverified data can also lead to clustering where survey effort could be targeted. 

From the policy side of things the record pool needs to be absolutely clear on what the records are being used for. If we can produce interactive maps available only to signed up admins within the ARG network. 

So far there are 7 admins who have interests in smaller areas than the whole of the UK. We could feed this information into the modelling work by Steve Langham to help with the refinement of the models to predict where animals should be etc 

Can I ask whether for public consumption the type of mapping used for sliding scales and add an Adder would be appropriate for displaying public surveys? 

Surveys such as the big spawn count, big pond thaw, make your nature count would be less sensitive than say long term monitoring sites where I hope that we could collate data but with a ticket box to keep

 this confidential. The reason would be to get other useful data on habitat use, phenology from records which can be displayed for general areas using charts and diagrams rather than maps. 

The record pool is intended for to be devised and developed using everyone's expertise and opinions. We need to get the balance right with material which will encourage recording but will also reduce the risk to animals 

Gemma did you get the results of the august download from the record pool? I sent it to both email addresses. There is a real mixture of records from consultancy, public etc