RECOMMENDATION 7: RECOGNITION & RESOURCING FOR SUPER PARTNERS

Super Partners should be fully recognised and sustained to a level that has the capacity to support verification on a major scale.

The contribution of Super Partners (including the National Recording Schemes, National Museums and Royal Botanic Gardens, the UK Species Inventory, the Non-Native Species Secretariat and the State of Nature Partnership) in the provision of key infrastructure (such as networks of expert Verifiers, curated reference collections, species taxonomies and bespoke databases enabling rich attribution of records) is essential to the success of the Infrastructure.

Each such Super Partner should be given special status as an NBN Expert Partner and access to funding in perpetuity towards the costs of maintaining a network of expert Verifiers, reference collections, species taxonomies and status reports for use in Scotland.

Where National Recording Schemes provide bespoke platforms for the curation and verification of a major taxonomic group with major public participation (such as BSBI’s Distribution Database for plants or BTO’s BirdTrack for birds) that cannot be fulfilled by iRecord, these National Recording Schemes should also be given special status as NBN Platform Partners to facilitate access to funding in perpetuity towards the costs of their system’s development and operation.

Aside from funding, National Recording Schemes should continue to be supported by iRecord and NBN Hub staff to access back office services and other professional support (such as for website development, communications and assistance with data curation).