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News from the Data Entry Project

It's a little difficult to report exciting news from the Data Entry Project when, in essence, keying thousands of records is pretty dull stuff! However, the project continues. Slowly, but surely, we are building up a reasonably sized database. There are currently something like 44,000 records keyed in. Those of you who were at the Recorders meeting in March may remember the rather long route some records take before they get added to the main database. This being the case, its very hard to give an exact figure. Table 1, shows the number of records keyed per Order, for the Orders that have been completed so far. Map 1, shows within 100 species bands, where these records have been collected. Note that the map only shows the distribution, by tetrad, of the species in the Orders listed in Table 1. Obviously, records collected at hectad level are not included in the map, but they are included in the totals in Table 1.

Map 1. Number of Species in each tetrad, by 100 Species band, for Orders shown in Table 1.

Boundary lines: The angular, dashed line shows the boundary of the Vice County (VC37), whilst the solid line shows the modern political boundary.

From the map, it should be clear that even with nearly 37,500 records, the county is still very thinly covered, with some tetrads with no records at all. I guess that this is understandable with some of the peripheral tetrads, but this doesn't explain the absence of records from such as SO9250 and SO9662.

The groups being keyed at present are Coleoptera, Odonata and Flora (currently about 6500 records keyed). It may be that by the time this is circulated, Birds are being keyed as well. The flora records are the historical ones, collected before the start of the Worcestershire Flora Project. This actually makes flora a good group to work on. Although there are more flora records than the rest of the BRC put together, the BRC records are not growing at present. It will take at least a couple of years to key in the flora records, but at least we've started.

If you have any questions about the project, please get in touch. General questions about records should be directed to John Meiklejohn

Table 1. Number of records, by Order, keyed so far.