BGS Hosted Metadata
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
- Citation identifier
- https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/id/1286b858-34a7-4ff2-84a1-a55e48d63e86
- Citation identifier
- doi: / 10.5285/1286b858-34a7-4ff2-84a1-a55e48d63e86
- Other citation details
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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
- Point of contact
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Organisation name Individual name Electronic mail address Role UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology Botham, M.S. Author Butterfly Conservation Middlebrook, I. Author British Trust for Ornithology Harris, S.
Author UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology Harrower, C. Author Butterfly Conservation Lowe, M.
Author UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology Roy, D.B. Author NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre Custodian NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre Publisher UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology Botham, M.S. Point of contact UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology Owner Butterfly Conservation
Owner British Trust for Ornithology
Owner Natural Environment Research Council
Owner Joint Nature Conservation Committee
Owner
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GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0
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Environmental Monitoring Facilities
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- Access constraints
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- no limitations
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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.
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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
- Text, table
- Language
- English
- Character set
- UTF8
- Topic category
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- 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
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Name Version Comma-separated values (CSV)
- Distributor contact
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Organisation name Individual name Electronic mail address Role NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre
Distributor
- OnLine resource
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Protocol Linkage Name https://data-package.ceh.ac.uk/data/1286b858-34a7-4ff2-84a1-a55e48d63e86 Download the data
- OnLine resource
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Protocol Linkage Name https://data-package.ceh.ac.uk/sd/1286b858-34a7-4ff2-84a1-a55e48d63e86.zip Supporting information
- Hierarchy level
- Dataset
- Other
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dataset
Conformance result
- Title
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Commission Regulation (EU) No 1089/2010 of 23 November 2010 implementing Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council as regards interoperability of spatial data sets and services
- Date (Publication)
- 2010-12-08
- Statement
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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.
Metadata
- File identifier
- 1286b858-34a7-4ff2-84a1-a55e48d63e86 XML
- Metadata language
- English
- Character set
- 8859 Part 1
- Hierarchy level
- Dataset
- Hierarchy level name
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dataset
- Date stamp
- 2025-03-21T09:20:56
- Metadata standard name
- UK GEMINI
- Metadata standard version
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2.3
- Metadata author
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Organisation name Individual name Electronic mail address Role NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre Point of contact
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