Once you’ve submitted it, your record joins thousands – even millions – of other records to form a massive set of data, which scientists from all over the country can access. But what do they do with all that information?
Assess the nature of a whole country!
If we combine the biological records from thousands of nature detectives from all over the country we can understand nature across the whole country! All this data can be used to make important reports which are used to make important decisions about how we look after wildlife. Lots of clever statistics are needed to calculate how well different species are doing in different places in the UK.
Your data is made available to conservationists and scientists around the country through the National Biodiversity Network Atlas.
Doing clever science!
When scientists want to make a claim about something, for example, someone might want to know if blackbirds are well suited for living in cities – they need some evidence for this. Without evidence it’s just a guess and not science! Data from biological records collected by Nature Detectives, like yourself, provide really important evidence to help scientists understand the natural world.
When scientists have enough evidence to believe their idea is correct, they write it all out in a scientific paper. A scientific paper is a report about what they did, what they found and why it’s important for everyone to know about what they found. Did you know that over 200 scientific papers have been published using biological records that have been looked after by the Biological Records Centre (they’re the people who look after our data too!).