Tuesday 14 January 2014

VC41 Squares

Just to follow up on George's post about BC's atlas project, the image below should (formatting permitting) show the number of species recorded from each of VC41's 10 km squares in each year since 1991, when the peak number of species was reached in that period and what the square's total species count is. I've not distinguished between squares that are coastal or on our boundary, but it might give us something to work on!

7 comments:

  1. The records in SO11 are probably Mike and Jake's. I think I might get up there soon and suss the place out. I believe the vice county boundary there might be the river Rhymney and it would be nice to record for VC41 as well as the atlas.

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  2. Yes, the records are from the tiny bit of VC41 by the Blaen Rhymney Reservoir that Mike and Jake trapped at a few times up until 2005. I'm not so worried about us doing these bits when there is a big chunk in another VC, but all records are good!

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  4. If it were just for the atlas it wouldn't matter which VC we were recording. I reckon that with just a couple of exceptions, if I was to record in almost any of the 1km squares just over the border in VC42, most if not all the species recorded would be new to that square, which would all add to the coverage of the atlas. Those of us who live and record so close to the borders of the county don't tend to worry too much about the niceties of which county gets the record. After all when it comes to something like a national atlas, what really matters is squares covered.

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  5. I agree with that Mark, best not to get too parochial about moth records. The difficulty can be in knowing the status of species outside our own county, but fortunately for two of our three neighbours there are distribution maps available.

    For Breconshire: http://www.b-i-s.org/moths

    For Monmouthshire: Martin Anthoney has produced a series of tetrad scale maps for macro-moths. If you don't subscribe to the Silurian newsletter and haven't seen these, I can email you them if you'd like them (there are several pdf docs covering all macro-moth species).

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  6. I should of course have mentioned the national distribution maps for macro-moths which are in the Provisional Atlas, and also online on the Moths Count website and NBN Gateway, but due to the small scale it is harder to tell which square is which (unless you zoom in on the NBN Gateway maps).

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  7. I've been up to SO11 this morning. I'd hoped to have got up to the top of the reservoir, but there was a gate and 'Keep Out' sign and as I was turning around thought I heard a banjo playing.
    Anyway, looking at the last two maps, there are some scandalously under recorded squares much closer to home (more so than SO11, if you take the bigger picture, rather than just VC41) , so perhaps I'll concentrate on some of those and only venture to SO11 if I'm looking for a change.

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