Take a look, through some of the common species of wildlife that live in the South Yorkshire area around Sheffield and Rotherham.
A recently extended patch of heathland and woodland, neighbouring Wyming Brook.
Help stop the badger cull coming to Sheffield and Rotherham!
Unveil the hidden world of insects in Sheffield & Rotherham with the newest issue of Kingfisher magazine.
How do we know if a species is rare, or common?
[lead] So what is a biological record? Is it like a Guinness world record? Not quite…[/lead]
As our Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust’s Chief Nature Detective Paul Richards said in this video, a biological record must contain 4 things:
But why do we need all these things?
What you saw means we need to know what type of organism you’ve seen. Was it a bird? Was it a fish? Without knowing what you saw a record is completely useless.
However, you might not always be able to get to the exact species. We classify species at different levels called taxonomic levels. The most precise taxonomic level is the species level, but maybe you can only get it to the family level (2 levels less precise). It’s still useful! If you provide a photograph or description with your record then someone might be able to help you.
Where were you? Were you in the centre of a busy city, or out in the middle of nowhere in the peak district? This is very important because we might see different species in different places. It’s good to be as accurate as possible too. The more accurate the record the better we can match up the record with the habitat around it.
If we look into our database and we see that an exciting species like Hen harrier has been seen on our reserve, but we don’t know when, maybe yesterday, maybe 30 years ago. You can imagine how recent a record is really useful information for us when we’re working out how healthy our nature reserve is. We also expect to see different species at different times of the year, maybe because they’re migratory or hibernate.
These records are very useful when we’re assessing how climate change is affecting our plants and animals. We see bees and blossom earlier every year because spring temperatures are warmer than they used to be. We wouldn’t know this if nature detectives didn’t record WHEN they made their record.
This might not seem as important but it really is, if you found something super rare or exciting then we’d need to be able to contact you to ask some other questions, to make sure that you did see what you said you saw.
…but don’t forget all the four important pieces of information! WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHO!
Record your sightings!
You can read more about biological records from our friends the at Field Studies Council: https://www.fscbiodiversity.uk/blog/what-biological-record