Recording bird data as
‘roving records’ for the BTO winter or breeding season atlas.
As the Recorder for
North-East Wales, I am keen to receive records at the 1 km square level – which
is the level that I use to record species’ records. I have been thinking about
how to ask you, observers, to record your bird sightings so that the data can
be used by both the BTO and by me, locally. I can only ask you to follow the
process outlined below, it is entirely optional. It is important that records
for the Atlas do not get ‘lost’, but I would like to be able to use as many
records as possible (especially counts of species rather than just species
lists) for our local reporting.
I have checked with Dawn
Balmer, the BTO Atlas Coordinator, and think the best way to achieve this would
be to ask you to keep all your roving records at the 1 km level and to enter
them into Birdtrack using the 1 km
level of recording. This would mean that the records could be amalgamated into
10 km square level records for the national atlas, tetrad level records for the
local
If you are willing to do
this, you must define your sites – so that the data associated with them can be
used by the national Atlas. Each site should preferably be defined at the 1 km
level so that the records could be put to all possible uses.
In BirdTrack Data Home click
on ‘View my sites’ and then click on the link ‘Manage sites’. You can then define the sites at the most
appropriate level. If your site falls
entirely within a 1-km square (see shaded area) then click ‘yes’. If your site does not fall entirely within a
1-km square you will be shown options for tetrads and 10-km square levels. In a few cases where sites span 10-km
boundaries, the best approach would be to leave your BirdTrack site as it is
and enter any notable records as Roving Records into the Atlas website.
Please note that this
request only applies to the roving records – any recording you do for Timed
Tetrad Visits (TTVs) must be entered on the Atlas website at tetrad level.