Information and Advsiory Note Number 69, January 1997
1.1 Recorder is a database application for site-related species records. It was written by Dr Stuart Ball of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) Support Unit. The system can be used for storing site information and species records, as well as many other aspects of biological recording.
1.2 Recorder was designed for use by local record centres and conservation organisations such as county wildlife trusts. It has proved equally useful to natural history groups, locally and nationally based recording schemes, utilities and consultancies and to individual naturalists. Recorder is not however designed for handling site management information (that is the province of the Countryside Management System - CMS).
2.1 The Recorder Project is managed as a JNCC “menu” project, being work which the statutory conservation agencies wish to take forward on a GB basis to promote common standards and to gain efficiencies of scale. The Recorder Board of Management represent the interests of Scottish Natural Heritage, English Nature, Countryside Council for Wales, the Environment and Heritage Service (NI) and the Wildlife Trusts. A Technical Group advises on issues arising from maintenance or development of the program and developments in the field of biological recording. SNH is represented on both of these groups by the Environmental Audit Branch.
3.1 Recorder has been written to address many of the problems associated with biological recording. The principle objectives of the project are to:
4.1 A biological record is the information about the occurrence of an animal or plant at a particular place and time. At minimum, it consists of four types of information:
“What” Recorder contains an extensive list of species of British freshwater and terrestrial organisms which include flowering plants; mosses, liverworts and other “lower plants”; fungi; invertebrates and vertebrates totalling over 37,000 taxa. In many cases information on status, biology, distribution and habitat affinities is included.
“Where” Many details of the location of a record can be included such as the OS National Grid reference, administrative county or region, district and parish, Watsonian vice-county and “site”. Where the location is defined as a site (for example, a nature reserve or a Site of Special Scientific Interest) then a great deal of information about its habitats, area, ownership, history, and many other attributes can be recorded.
“When” Whilst it is usually straightforward to record the date of an observation, Recorder can also cope with a variety of more complex situations such as the period during which a trap was set or vaguely defined dates associated with old collections or literature.
“Who” To be of any use a record must also include information about its source: who recorded or who identified the animal or plant; where has the information been published; in what museum or herbarium collection is a specimen held; Recorder demands that a source of some sort is included for each record.
4.2 Many other pieces of information can potentially add to the value of a record: how was the record made; what was the sex or life stage of the animal or plant involved; how many were there; were they associated with other species; the habitat the species was found in. Recorder can handle a wide range of “additional information” of this type, but does not insist that it is given.
4.3 Recorder also stores information on events, sites, people and literature references.
5.1 As well as storing information in an organised way using standardised coding systems, Recorder provides great flexibility in retrieving and reporting on records. information can be produced as printed text, maps, histograms, or files which can be incorporated in word processor documents or analysed by spreadsheets, statistical and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) packages. The two commonest questions that are asked of biological records are:
5.2 Recorder has menu driven facilities which allow biological records to be selected and sorted and incorporated in standard reports to answer questions quickly and efficiently.
5.3 Recorder also includes a distribution map plotting routine (Plot 5) which allows complicated maps at a variety of scales to be plotted directly from information stored in the database.
5.4 In addition to standard reports, a wide variety of tools are available to allow ad hoc enquiries to be framed, and to design output forms to report the results. Within the SNH Local GIS Facility a link has been provided to facilitate import and plotting of Recorder format data in ArcView.
5.5 Recorder is mainly used to provide detailed information on the species occurring in particular localities and allows comparison with other localities, or to examine the status and distribution of species within a given geographical area (e.g. site, grid square, county). Such information is vital for site management planning, as an input into the land use planning system, as a source of data for ecological research, and is expected to be required with increasing priority for the preparation of local and national action plans.
5.6 About 500 copies of the system are currently in use in the UK, with Local Record Centres, County Wildlife Trusts and individual naturalists being the main users. Other users include Local Authorities, the statutory conservation agencies, The National Trust, and National Parks.
5.7 A questionnaire survey of users in spring 1996 elicited responses from 143 users. Nearly 5 million records were held by them, the great majority of which were recent (84% post 1980, 43% post 1990), and precisely located geographically (78% to 1km or better, 55% to within 100m). The taxonomic breakdown of records in the questionnaire returns is given below and compared with the BRC computerised records (as of November 1995).
5.8 Although the taxonomic mix is similar, there is little overlap of records held by BRC and by Recorder users. The full results of the questionnaire were reported in the July 1996 Recorder Newsletter (available from JNCC).
5.9 A comprehensive user manual has been recently re-written for version 3.22. A tutorial, which includes test data to enable users to get started quickly, has also been provided. Users with technical difficulties can telephone the support help desk. The program is actively maintained; upgrades are sent to all registered users. A number of informal user groups have also been set-up to allow experience and tips to be exchanged. The Scottish Recorder Users Group is led by Fife Nature through the Biological Recording in Scotland Campaign (BRISC).
5.10 Recorder is currently implemented in the commercial database management software “Advanced Revelation” (ARev) version 3.1 running under DOS. It is supplied with the runtime version of ARev.
6.1 The Recorder Board of Management recently reviewed the project (Recorder Health Check Study Report. Hyperion 1995). It concluded that the system, as originally specified, has been fairly successful in meeting the needs of Local Record Centres but has the potential to fulfil a wider role amongst natural history and conservation organisations. There is potential for more individual naturalists to use Recorder in the future as computer ownership becomes more widespread.
6.2 A problem identified was the perception that Recorder was too big and complex, and hard to learn. The choice of a little known database platform (ARev) has also proved a barrier to uptake in a number of organisations such as Local Authorities, where most IT staff do not know anything about ARev.
6.3 The Board of Management recommended that the current version of Recorder should be supported on a care and maintenance basis, whilst a new version is developed in a Windows environment. This should be platform-independent and should use an open database architecture so that other software (especially Geographical Information Systems) can directly access data. This recommendation has been accepted by the Joint Nature Conservation Committee.
6.4 Re-development of the program will proceed via a series of stages. The first of these, systems analysis, commenced in November 1996, and will be complete by the end of March 1997. The contractor appointed will assess the requirements of a wide variety of users for software to manage biological records through analysis of documents and by interviews and meetings with users. The information gained will be used, in conjunction with information about standards for managing biological data, to provide a series of options to allow JNCC to decide the scope of the new application.
6.5 Further stages of the re-development process include: agreeing the specification for the new application; programming and testing; documentation; and migration of data from the current version. It is planned that the Windows version of Recorder will be released in mid 1998.
Recorder Health Check Study Report. July 18 1995. Release B2. Hyperion. 34pp.
Recorder User Manual. September 1995. Recorder Board of Management.
Recorder Tutorial. September 1995. Recorder Board of Management.
Recorder Newsletter. Number 11. July 1996. JNCC. 11pp.
Dr James Milliams
with contributions from Dr Stuart Ball, Dr Vin Fleming, Ed Mackey and Julian Holbrook.