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United Kingdom Butterfly Monitoring Scheme: site indices 2021

This dataset comprises individual site indices for UK butterfly species calculated from data from the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (UKBMS). Site indices are a relative rather than an absolute measure of the size of a population, and have been shown to relate closely to other, more intensive, measures of population size such as mark, release, recapture (MRR) methods. The site index can be thought of as a relative measure of the population size, being a more or less constant proportion of the number of butterflies present. The proportion seen is likely to vary according to species; some butterfly species are more conspicuous and thus more easily detected, whereas others are much less easy to see. Site indices are only calculated at sites with sufficient monitoring visits throughout the season, or for targeted reduced effort surveys (timed observations, larval web counts and egg counts) where counts are generally obtained as close to the peak of the flight period as possible and are subsequently adjusted for the time of year and size of the site (area of suitable habitat type for a given species). Wider Countryside Butterfly Survey (WCBS) sites are thus excluded because they are based on very few visits from which indices of abundance are not calculated. For transect sites, a statistical model (a General Additive Model, 'GAM') is used to impute missing values and to calculate a site index. Each year most transect sites (over 90%) produce an index for at least one species and in recent years site indices have been calculated for over 2,000 sites across the UK. Site indices are subsequently collated to contribute to the overall 'Collated Index' for each species, which are relative measures of the abundance of each species across a geographical area, for example, across the whole UK or at country level for England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. Individual site indices are important in informing conservation management as not all sites show the same patterns for each species and likely reflect a combination of local climate and habitat management at the site. The UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme is organized and funded by Butterfly Conservation (BC), the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC). The UKBMS is indebted to all volunteers who contribute data to the scheme. This work was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council award number NE/R016429/1 as part of the UK-SCAPE programme delivering National Capability. Full details about this dataset can be found at https://doi.org/10.5285/1286b858-34a7-4ff2-84a1-a55e48d63e86

Simple

Date (Publication)
2022-11-22
Identifier
https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/id/1286b858-34a7-4ff2-84a1-a55e48d63e86
Identifier
doi: / 10.5285/1286b858-34a7-4ff2-84a1-a55e48d63e86
Other citation details
Botham, M.S., Middlebrook, I., Harris, S., Harrower, C., Lowe, M., Roy, D.B. (2022). United Kingdom Butterfly Monitoring Scheme: site indices 2021. NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre 10.5285/1286b858-34a7-4ff2-84a1-a55e48d63e86
Author
  UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology - Botham, M.S.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5276-1405
Author
  Butterfly Conservation - Middlebrook, I.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0448-9144
Author
  British Trust for Ornithology - Harris, S.
Author
  UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology - Harrower, C.
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5070-5293
Author
  Butterfly Conservation - Lowe, M.
Author
  UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology - Roy, D.B.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5147-0331
Custodian
  NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre
Publisher
  NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre
Point of contact
  UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology - Botham, M.S.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5276-1405
Owner
  UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
Owner
  Butterfly Conservation
Owner
  British Trust for Ornithology
Owner
  Natural Environment Research Council
Owner
  Joint Nature Conservation Committee
GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0
  • Environmental Monitoring Facilities
Access constraints
otherRestrictions Other restrictions
Other constraints
no limitations
Use constraints
otherRestrictions Other restrictions
Other constraints
This resource is available under the terms of the Open Government Licence
Use constraints
otherRestrictions Other restrictions
Other constraints
Contains UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (UKBMS) data © copyright and database right Butterfly Conservation, the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, British Trust for Ornithology, and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee.
Use constraints
otherRestrictions Other restrictions
Other constraints
If you reuse this data, you should cite: Botham, M.S., Middlebrook, I., Harris, S., Harrower, C., Lowe, M., Roy, D.B. (2022). United Kingdom Butterfly Monitoring Scheme: site indices 2021. NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre https://doi.org/10.5285/1286b858-34a7-4ff2-84a1-a55e48d63e86
Spatial representation type
textTable Text, table
Metadata language
EnglishEnglish
Character set
utf8 UTF8
Topic category
  • Biota
Begin date
2021-04-01
End date
2021-09-30
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Unique resource identifier
OSGB 1936 / British National Grid
Unique resource identifier
OSNI 1952 / Irish National Grid
Distribution format
  • Comma-separated values (CSV) ()

Distributor
  NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre
OnLine resource
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dataset Dataset
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Conformance result

Date (Publication)
2010-12-08
Statement
Automatic checks are applied when data are entered into the Transect Walker program to alert recorders to potential data entry errors, e.g. abnormally high counts of a species or a record of species outside of its recognised flight period. The recorder is given the option to proceed with the record or to alter it appropriately. Each site data belongs to a region for which a transect coordinator is responsible. The regional coordinator has good knowledge of the sites they receive records for and checks the records for any questionable records. Data entered online is also checked by the regional transect coordinators and can be done so continuously throughout the season. Following these preliminary validation checks, the data undergoes a series of further automated and manual validation procedures including queries to check for records of species that are: recorded out of their known distribution range (using data from Butterfly Conservation's Butterflies for the New Millennium (BNM) and existing UKBMS data), recorded out of their normal flight period, recorded for the first time at a site, have extreme abundances or abundances that are markedly different to normal for a given site at a given time of year.
File identifier
1286b858-34a7-4ff2-84a1-a55e48d63e86 XML
Metadata language
EnglishEnglish
Character set
ISO/IEC 8859-1 (also known as Latin 1) 8859 Part 1
Hierarchy level
dataset Dataset
Hierarchy level name
dataset
Date stamp
2025-03-21T09:20:56
Metadata standard name
UK GEMINI
Metadata standard version
2.3
Point of contact
  NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre
Lancaster Environment Centre, Library Avenue, Bailrigg , Lancaster , LA1 4AP , UK
https://eidc.ac.uk/
 
 

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Keywords

GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0
Environmental Monitoring Facilities

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