UK BIOSCAN Partner Network is a UK-wide network, with the BIOSCAN project team based in Hinxton, Cambridgshire

What excites the group about recording wildlife and what motivates them to get involved?

“What excites us is being able to track thousands of species of insects across time and space in a way that simply wasn’t possible before. DNA based approaches to species identification makes this possible for species beyond those that are familiar and more straightforward to identify and record visually. Every insect we examine through the BIOSCAN project brings this thrill, and sites where species presence was thought to have been extremely well mapped are still yielding species new to them, and occasionally even new to the UK. The scale of what we are doing in terms of identification and recording is only possible thanks to two groups of people. Our volunteer partners out in the field are amazing and they include citizen scientists and retired volunteers to natural history societies, wildlife trusts, zoos, schools, farms, rewilding projects, universities, museums, and government agencies. Alongside them, at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, many people have invested hugely turning what the partners collect into species records at incredible scale. What motivates everyone involved is knowing their effort doesn’t stop at their own site: the records are open to everyone, feeding into the NBN Atlas, GBIF and the global effort to understand life on Earth.”

You can find out more about the work of the network on: