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Welcome to the BRC newsletter
 
We are pleased to provide this update from the Biological Records Centre (BRC). BRC has provided a focus for biological recording for over sixty years and works closely with more than 100 national recording schemes and societies. We hope you enjoy reading about some of our recent activities.
The BRC team
News from the recording and monitoring schemes
  • Anniversaries for UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme and National Plant Monitoring Scheme
  • Publications and updates from UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme and National Plant Monitoring Scheme
  • Launch of the National Vegetation Plot Database for Great Britain
  • Recording scheme meetings in autumn 2025
Recording practices of dragonfly recorders
Although dragonfly occurrence records underpin regional and national atlases, recording methods are diverse. This can create challenges when trying to develop and improve dataflows. We report on results from last September's survey of dragonfly recorders.
 
Non-native species news
Including a new horizon scanning exercise in March 2025 updating the watchlist of invasive non-native species; updates to the GBNNSIP species lists; key messages on the adverse effects of Invasive Non-native Species. 

Read more...
Making wildlife records available via the NBN Atlas

The National Biodiversity Network (NBN) Atlas is the UK’s largest repository of publicly available biodiversity data. Records from iRecord are regularly shared to NBN Atlas, with the latest monthly upload including 330,000 new species records.

Read more...
Forthcoming conferences
We look forward to these national biological recording conferences:
  • NBN Conference 2025: 20 November 2025, Brunel's SS Great Britain Bristol – booking details
  • NFBR 40th Celebration Conference: 7–8 May 2026, Signing Tree conference centre Birmingham – booking details
dataXplore
dataXplore is a new user friendly web-based app, used to screen species occurrence data for common forms of bias when used in analysis. It is built as an interface to the R package occAssess, but it does not require any programming skills to use it. 
 
New record cleaner

The Record Cleaner tool helps to spot potential problems in your wildlife records, finding incorrectly formatted entries and highlighting unexpected records. A new web based version has been developed, which will make the Record Cleaner more widely applicable as it can now be accessed via an API.

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BRC National Recording Schemes meeting 2025

Last March we welcomed around 50 national recording scheme organisers, alongside colleagues from UKCEH, Defra, JNCC and Natural England, to the 2025 BRC National Recording Schemes meeting.

Read more...
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This is a newsletter from the Biological Records Centre (BRC).  BRC is a partnership between the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee. For further information contact brc@ceh.ac.uk or write to us at the address below. View our privacy policy here.

Our mailing address is:
Biological Records Centre, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology,
Benson Lane, Crowmarsh Gifford, WALLINGFORD. OX10 8BB

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