Blog Contributor – Liam Taylor, Data Manager at Caring for God’s Acre
The Beautiful Burial Ground (BBG) Project team has been sharing knowledge about the built, natural and social heritage of burial grounds since 2018. The project will finish in late 2022. The activities on the biodiversity side have involved encouraging wildlife recording in burial grounds, submitting records, and making those records accessible to the general public, recorders and those managing these special places. The project has developed a Beautiful Burial Grounds Portal within the NBN Atlas (National Biodiversity Network Atlas) which is pioneering the use of the NBN Atlas for a specific project.
With fabulous partners and recorders the project has delivered over 150 training activities for over 2000 volunteers. There have been many sessions specific for people with disability needs such as those with mobility, vision or hearing impairments. Now more people can enjoy identifying wildlife and submitting records to the national database, the NBN Atlas, which everyone can access. The BBG Project has also encouraged groups to run their own recording activities – for example during the last three years of Love Your Burial Ground week over 800 events were organised – ranging from small bug hunts with local school in churchyards to BioBlitz’s in large cemeteries.
As part of Churches Count on Nature 2022, we encouraged a portion of the recording community to engage with our project on iNaturalistUK. iNaturalist can help with species identification, the process is relatively user-friendly and you can get all the work done out in the field rather than typing up at home afterwards.
The initiative has been a tremendous success with almost 3,000 records made, of 834 Species, by 91 different people contributing so far. The project on iNaturalistUK is permanent and the BBG Project welcome records all year round.
You need to join the ‘Beautiful Burial Grounds’ project before submitting records and all of this can be done within the iNaturalist app. The BBG Project team created a short video to demonstrate the steps required for anyone new to the platform.
Since the start of the BBG project we have been making use of iRecord. iRecord is an excellent initiative which we continue to use in conjunction with iNaturalist. iRecord suits our need for submitting longer lists of records. The ultimate destination for records submitting on both of these platforms is the NBN Atlas, and can be viewed on our Burial Grounds Portal. Further information and links to our different recording options can be found here.
Below is a map of the Churches Count on Nature records submitted via the project on iNaturalistUK.
With thanks to all our partners who made our project possible. To name but a few – Church of England, Church in Wales, NBN Trust, iNaturalistUK, iRecord, and the Heritage Lottery.