National Moth Recording Scheme
The National Moth Recording Scheme (NMRS) database has grown to an amazing 11.3 million moth records!!
A refresh of the NMRS data available online through the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) Gateway took place during the summer. With this update, the NMRS is now the largest dataset on the NBN Gateway, with 10.2 million records publicly available to view (either on the Gateway itself or via the Moths Count and UK Moths websites). Because of the size of the NMRS dataset, it takes a considerable amount of time and effort to undertake Gateway updates, so these are only done periodically (usually every six months). Hence the online dataset always lags behind what in the ‘live’ NMRS database on the server at Butterfly Conservation Head Office. This is why county datasets may take some months to appear online, even after they have been received and imported into the NMRS.
Perhaps even more incredible than the number of records is that every UK vice-county is now represented in the NMRS. Thanks go to everyone who has enabled this milestone to be reached.
The maps are, of course, provisional and, despite the best efforts of County Moth Recorders and ourselves, some errors are inevitable. One of the purposes of this publication is to enable people to identify these errors, as well as to highlight under-recorded areas and, ultimately, to inform conservation priorities and policy. Complimentary copies of the Provisional Atlas will be sent to County Moth Recorders and others who’ve played vital roles in the development of the NMRS database. Copies will also be available for sale from Butterfly Conservation Head Office and, in addition, the atlas be freely accessible online from the Moths Count website.
The Provisional Atlas of the UK’s Larger Moths will be published in the next couple of weeks, just in time for Christmas. We have also recently published the 2010 Atlas of Butterflies in Britain and Ireland. This publication presents up-to-date distribution maps for the years 2005 – 2009, for all butterfly species (except the large Blue) that breed in the Britain and Ireland
Following the publication of the Provisional Atlas, the next big undertaking for the NMRS team will be to analyse the data and calculate distribution changes for each of the macro-moth species. At the moment the data is heavily biased towards more recent records and this will need to be addressed and factored into the analysis to ensure that the results are robust. We will start this analysis very soon and make the results available to the moth recording community in due course.