At the end of the week they held a joint conference with the
British Ecological Society. It was quite
relevant to me, both through my studies with Manchester Metropolitan
University, and through my volunteering with the Local Records Centre. As it was being held in my region, I thought I would go
along but I was only able to attend the first day of the conference due to
other commitments.
The drive to Sheffield took about an hour, and I made my way
slowly through the rush hour traffic to “The Edge”, a conference facility at
Endcliffe Village which is part of the university. After negotiating my way down a narrow
cobbled street and finally finding somewhere to park, I arrived in time to grab
a cup of tea and meet a few people before moving into the conference room.
The morning’s sessions were all concerned with technology.
It was really interesting to hear about the various systems that can support
biological recording. Indicia, who have
developed the INNS Mapper for Yorkshire Wildlife Trust as well as many other
recording group schemes were present. I was particularly interested to learn
about QGIS – free GIS software – and some relevant plugins that have been
developed specifically for ecological and biological recording. These include
grid systems are a range of resolutions, and colour codings such as may be used
in a recording atlas. It is definitely something that I will explore when I
have a few spare minutes. The other
thing was Scratchpad which provides free webpages for species and taxanomic
projects, and there is also an option to publish scientific data – an option
for my dissertation project I think as it would be good to share some of the
photographs I have taken and some of the conclusions (in due course).
At lunchtime I sat outside enjoying the sunshine and chatting with other delegates over a sandwich.
In the afternoon, there were a series of workshops
discussing various themes and issues in biological recording. I sat in on a
session concerned with the verification process – who are verifiers, what do
they need to do the job effectively, and how can new people be encouraged? Whilst there was some interesting discussion,
there are clearly a lot of people that take the traditional approach of one
person being the county recorder for xyz species. There seemed little interest,
in my group at least, about trying to get other people involved, making more
use of online systems, and perhaps having multiple verifiers with a lower level
of specialisation to ensure records are confirmed quickly but without losing
any of the accuracy (similar to i-Spot verification, which uses peer group users to review and agree/amend identifications).
In all, it was a good conference and refreshing to see
people from quite different backgrounds coming together to discuss a common
theme.
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