Consultants Portal Update

The Consultants Portal has been designed as a place for environmental consultants and other biological recording professionals to share their biological records. It functions as a consultancy data management tool as well as a link to the NBN Gateway.
 
Momentum is truly picking up with the Consultants Portal, and we expect this to increase over the coming months as the survey season draws to a close and environmental consultants start to spend more office time working through the thousands of biological records they have collected over the summer season.
 
Over the past 2 months, the number of records on the Consultants Portal has increased from approximately 600 records, to now nearly 16,000! There are 109 registered users, and these numbers are continuously increasing.
 
We have been collecting feedback from our registered users over the last few months and are implementing improvements suggested by them in order to create a Portal that functions well for everyone involved.
 
Aquatonics Ltd has been using the Consultants Portal to add data from a range of surveys of freshwater and estuarine habitats undertaken since 1993. Dr Phil Smith of Aquatonics said “I have been very pleased with the relative ease of adding data to the NBN database. After some minor glitches early on, mainly due to not quite understanding how it all worked, I found data input very straightforward and managed to upload data from several surveys each day. Ella Vogel of the NBN has responded to queries very quickly and even added some additional taxa found by Aquatonics Ltd that are new records for the UK. I particularly like the ease with which you can check that the NBN shows data in the right location and the way that all locations of the various survey data entered can be shown on a single map. Another excellent feature is the integration of the NBN Record Cleaner into the data entry on the Consultants' Portal. This has picked up some typos and some changes in nomenclature that I hadn't spotted. Any erroneous entries are shown in an Excel spreadsheet which gives information on why they were rejected. In most cases these mistakes are easily rectified, and the corrected entries can be uploaded. I have also been impressed that NBN specialist volunteer verifiers in various groups (leeches, earthworms and caddisflies) have queried some of the data. This gives me confidence that there are quality assurance systems in place for most groups.”
 
The Consultants Portal is free to use and free training and support is offered for consultancies across the UK.
 
Look out for our Consultants Portal article in the next edition of British Wildlife.
 
If you have any questions about the Consultants Portal, please contact us

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