The National Trust for Scotland has, in collaboration, with iRecord designed a new wildlife recording webpage where visitors to NTS properties can record the plants and animals they see as they explore the Trust’s gardens, woodlands, moors, and mountains.
NTS is the third largest landowner in Scotland with stewardship of over 76,000 hectares of countryside such as the magnificent Ben Lawers mountain range and the stunning islands of St Kilda.
A relatively small Ranger’s Service monitors priority species and habitats as part of a rolling programme of survey and monitoring work. However, with such large areas to cover and strict time commitments, it is the common and less charismatic species which often go under recorded.
The NTS Rangers Service gratefully receives many wildlife records from members of the public but these are often restricted to the rare or the magnificent. This website provides a simple and accessible system where anyone can tell us what they have seen, be it an earthworm or an eagle, and hopefully inspire budding recorders to keep telling us!
The easy to use form provided by iRecord caters to the beginner as well as the more experienced recorder. As the site is mobile enabled this can even be done on the move and a photo upload option allows easier verification of the record. The simple to use mapping tool means more accurate locational data can also be recorded.
Crucially, the anticipated surge in wildlife records will not infringe on precious staff time as little data management is required. The diagram below shows the traditional data flow for records received by visitors to Trust properties (green & blue) compared to the simpler, quicker, and more accurate data flow from the new recording page (red).
As the recording form is provided by iRecord through an iFrame link, records will go directly to the (BRC) iRecord database where they can be verified by an established network of experts. Verified records will then be shared with the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) where they will be available via the NBN Gateway and the Atlas of Living Scotland allowing them to achieve their full potential by contributing to scientific research, conservation projects and decision making nationwide.
Figure 1: NTS Public records traditional data flow and webpage data flow.