Written by Chris Raper, Manager of the UK Species Inventory at the Natural History Museum, London.
The latter half of 2014 has seen some excellent new checklists making their way into the UK Species Inventory, with the arrival of the MSBIAS marine checklist and the GBNNSIP checklist of non-native species. These lists are different in scale – the marine list numbered over 22570 names while the non-natives numbered around 3050 – but both have been long awaited and have great potential to help recorders.
The MSBIAS list has been derived from UK data supplied by WoRMS, the World Register of Marine Species, a very well respected and up to date resource. However, merging the WoRMS data into an NBN model did prove to be quite “interesting” … it’s amazing how different 2 seemingly identical systems can be! It seems to have settled in nicely now though and has been adopted by Marine Recorder users, bringing the most significant update to marine taxonomy since the Ulster Museum list was produced.
The GBNNSIP checklist of non-native species has been produced by staff based at CEH in Wallingford, and contains all of the species that they recognise as non-native, along with their GB Establishment Status, held in the taxonomic designation system. By using the taxon designations it gives us the ability to layer-in extra statuses when things like degrees of invasiveness are agreed upon. Currently the checklist can be used to display the GB Establishment Status against a taxon and, with some fancy SQL, can be used as a filter to extract observations for species that occur on the list – allowing local maps/lists of non-native species to be created.
NBN Trust comments that there was a huge amount of behind the scenes work to complete this project, and would like to give mention to Chris, Lynn Heeley and Becky Seeley for all their work on this.