The Biological Records Centre: a pioneer of citizen science

By Michael J. O. Pocock, Helen E. Roy, Chris D. Preston, David Roy. 2015

191 citations recorded by the source corpus.

People have been recording wildlife for centuries and the resulting datasets lead to important scientific research. The Biological Records Centre (BRC), established in 1964, is a national focus for terrestrial and freshwater species recording in the United Kingdom (UK). BRC works with the voluntary recording community (i.e. a mutualistic symbiosis) through support of national recording schemes (i.e. ‘citizen science’, but unlike most citizen science it is volunteer led) and adds value to the data through analysis and reporting. Biological recording represents a diverse range of activities, involving an estimated 70 000 people annually in the UK, from expert volunteers undertaking systematic monitoring to mass participation recording. It is an invaluable monitoring tool because the datasets are long term, have large geographic extent and are taxonomically diverse (85 taxonomic groups). It supports a diverse range of outputs, e.g. atlases showing national distributions (12 127 species from over 40 taxonomic groups) and quantified trends (1636 species). BRC pioneers the use of technology for data capture (online portals and smartphone apps) and verification (including automated verification) through customisable, inter-operable database systems to facilitate efficient data flow. We are confident that biological recording has a bright future with benefits for people, science, and nature.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/43f1b0d422899c87fa731cd59c3bc121bdc13caa

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Citations in the corpus

The value of monitoring wildlife roadkill (2020, background): “scientific studies or surveys by ecological consultants), and increasingly through citizen science projects, all of which can consist of standardised surveys and/or opportunistic sightings (August et al. 2015; Berry 1988; Pocock et al. 2015).”
Air pollution and its effects on lichens, bryophytes, and lichen‐feeding Lepidoptera: review and evidence from biological records (2015, background): “…distributional data from amateur and professional naturalists is yielding many new opportunities for the study of trends in the abundance and frequency of species in different groups, and allowing us to relate these to changes in the wider environment (Roy et al., 2014; Pocock et al., 2015).”
The harlequin ladybird, Harmonia axyridis: global perspectives on invasion history and ecology (2016, background): “…in monitoring the distribution of H. axyridis and the lessons learnt from such initiatives have been shared and proved informative for developing approaches to citizen science (Gardiner et al. 2012; Pocock et al. 2015; Roy et al. 2012a) and inspiring new projects both within and between countries.”
A DNA barcoding framework for taxonomic verification in the Darwin Tree of Life Project (2024, background): “Moreover, despite centuries of intensive study of the natural history of Britain and Ireland (Allen, 1976; Harding, 1992; Pocock et al., 2015; Stroh et al., 2023), the integration of new morphological observations with DNA barcoding and genomic sequencing will inevitably lead to species discovery…”