Record Cleaner

Record Cleaner is a free online tool to help people improve the quality of their wildlife records and databases.

Whether you are an individual recorder or work in an organisation such as Local Environmental Records Centre or a Recording Scheme, the Record Cleaner is designed to help you spot potential problems in your data. The goal is to aid the process of data cleaning and ensure the quality of any datasets you pass on to others.

In 2024-25 Record Cleaner was redeveloped by UKCEH Biological Records Centre (BRC), building on the earlier NBN Record Cleaner approach, and with support from Defra, via the Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment Programme, and from Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) National Capability funding.

The online Record Cleaner can be accessed via the BRC website:

www.brc.ac.uk/record_cleaner

Automatic checks

Sets of records can be uploaded to Record Cleaner using Excel spreadsheets or .csv text files.

The tool first “validates” your data – checking the format against a set of built-in rules. This includes spotting incorrectly formatted dates (e.g. 31st February) or spatial references (e.g. TL123), and checking that species names match the UK Species Inventory. Any errors that the system identifies can be downloaded so that the records can be corrected.

You can then apply “verification rules” for taxon groups that have them. These essentially check whether any of the records are outliers in some way, e.g. if the record is outside the known range, or occurring at a time of the year when it is not expected. The system also provides a code number to indicate how difficult the species is to identify, in case any further review is needed for the more tricky species.

The verification rules have been provided by experts working with the national recording schemes (see section below for the verification rules documentation). Some of these rulesets are quite old and ranges for some species have changed. BRC and National Biodiversity Network (NBN) are working with the recording schemes to update the rules where possible.

Record Cleaner has previously been available via the NBN as a standalone piece of software, using the same underlying rules as the current online version. The standalone software is still available (see here), but has not been updated recently and may not function well using modern operating systems. The online version of Record Cleaner is intended to provide replacement functionality into the future. The web interface on the BRC website uses the Record Cleaner API, which is also available for use more widely. Contact BRC for more information on how to access the API.

Improving data quality – verification rules

The online Record Cleaner uses the same rules as NBN Recorder, which are now managed via the GitHub code repository. BRC anticipate making edits to the rulesets to bring them up to date with current knowledge, with the support of the national recording schemes.

The reports below are all concerned with improving data quality and have all been produced under the NBN Trust’s contract with Defra. They outline how verification rules were created and what verification processes should be used – essentially, what to do with records flagged up by Record Cleaner.