Blogs

What are the FSC BioLinks Volunteer ID Days all about? 
These days are perfect for beginners to practice their identification and recording skills and for those wanting to get “into” a new group. We have a range of activities to help improve your skills by sorting through samples, creating collections, inputting records and much more. This blog explains what you can get up to and why others find them so useful. 

Britain is very lucky to have a rich history in biological recording. As a result, the UK has a well developed network of organisations involved in biological recording. Getting your head around what these recording organisations do and how they can help you can be confusing, so we hope this will provide some clarity!

The FSC BioLinks project provides training to develop the skills of existing biological recorders and to create new recorders. We're doing this to build and strengthen the biological recording community…but what is a biological record?

Today we released a new version of the FSC QGIS Plugin (version 3.2.0 released 27th Feburary 2019). This feels like a real milestone for the FSC QGIS Plugin for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's packed with new features including the ability to handle Irish as well as British grid references, the ability to link directly to a Recorder 6 database as a source for the Biological Records tool, the addition of a new 'Add Grid Refs to layers' tool and many more. Secondly the release is a collaborative effort with a major contribution, on the Recorder 6 feature, from Ian Carle of the Hertfordshire Environmental Records Centre. Thirdly we have announced new governanace arrangements for this open source project into the future.

In celebration of the International Day of Women in Science, I thought I’d celebrate some of the women who’ve been involved in BioLinks so far, all of whom have contributed in different ways to a successful first year of the project.

Collecting is essential for the study of most invertebrate taxa because most of them are so small they require microscopic examination to ID them to species level. Many people think this seems a bit backwards because we have to kill things in order to study them and, in the current biodiversity crisis, surely killing things is the last thing we should be doing? This is not necessarily the case...

FSC Identikit is an open-source platform for building online ID resources, including multi-access keys, driven by spreadsheets of taxonomic/morphological knowledge. 2018 has been a year of intensive development of Identikit and Esmée Fairbairn’s support has enabled us to completely restructure the software ‘under the hood’ to add the capacity to deliver ID resources in the field – even where an internet connection is not available.

It's not always the collection of specimens or microscopic examination that puts people off invertebrate identification, some people seem to almost have a mental block and feel out of depth whenever any binomial names (or Latin/scientific names) are mentioned. Binomial nomenclature is a formal system for naming species and it was put in place to avoid confusion, not cause it. Here's why it shouldn't scare you.. 

Data flow can be a controversial and confusing topic within the biological recording sector. So where should you, as a biological recorder, submit your record? Keiron Derek Brown discusses his thoughts on what to consider when deciding who to submit your species records to.