Tayside Recorders – Help For Recorders

Tayside Recorders - Help For Recorders

The four W’s in biological recording

  • Who: Person who is making the observation.
  • What: What you saw in as much detail as possible including the numbers of the species.
  • Where: Where the observation was made, detailed description of the habitat, grid reference (Ordnance survey is available for this).
  • When: When you made the observation.

Downloads

Downloadable example recording spreadsheet in excel – Click Here

A printable recording form PDF – Click Here

How to make a grid reference – Click Here

The ordnance survey has produced a number of guides to help with grid references – Click Here

National grid PDF – Click Here

Map Reading Booklet – Click Here

iRecord – https://www.brc.ac.uk/irecord/

A Guide to Using iRecord (updated 2019): https://www.brc.ac.uk/irecord/sites/default/files/guides/irecord-training_2019-v3.0-IMPORTS.pdf

What is a Watsonian vice county –

Watsonian vice-counties are subdivisions of Great Britain and Ireland used largely for the purposes of biological recording.

The system was devised by a botanist, Hewett Cottrell Watson, in 1852.

The vice-counties are based on the ancient counties of Britain, but these were often subdivided to create areas of similar size. The vice-counties have remained unchanged by subsequent local government reorganisations, allowing historical and modern data to be more accurately compared.

Every vice-county in Britain has a name, and additionally, they are numbered from 1 to 112. Vice counties in Ireland are numbered from H1 to H40.
In the Tayside region we may encounter the following vice counties

  • 86 Stirlingshire
  • 87 West Perthshire
  • 88 Mid Perthshire
  • 89 East Perthshire
  • 90 Angus

The Biological Records Centre have a Vice County grid square generator – Click Here

For information on what you can do go to the ‘Get involved’ section and then towards ‘Projects’ on the main Biodiversity menu.