bdffdd79-7744-4d48-9f4f-d77a3ab98573 English ISO/IEC 8859-1 (also known as Latin 1) dataset dataset NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre Lancaster Environment Centre, Library Avenue, Bailrigg Lancaster LA1 4AP UK info@eidc.ac.uk https://eidc.ac.uk/ EIDC website The Environmental Information Data Centre (EIDC) is the UK's national data centre for terrestrial and freshwater sciences. information pointOfContact 2026-01-09T10:10:35 UK GEMINI 2.3 OSGB 1936 / British National Grid OSNI 1952 / Irish National Grid United Kingdom Butterfly Monitoring Scheme: site indices 2022 2023-12-20 publication https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/id/bdffdd79-7744-4d48-9f4f-d77a3ab98573 10.5285/bdffdd79-7744-4d48-9f4f-d77a3ab98573 doi: Botham, M.S., Middlebrook, I., Harrower, C., Conway, R., Roy, D.B. (2023). United Kingdom Butterfly Monitoring Scheme: site indices 2022. NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre 10.5285/bdffdd79-7744-4d48-9f4f-d77a3ab98573 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/bdffdd79-7744-4d48-9f4f-d77a3ab98573 Botham, M.S. UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology enquiries@ceh.ac.uk https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5276-1405 ORCID record ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. information author Middlebrook, I. Butterfly Conservation imiddlebrook@butterfly-conservation.org https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0448-9144 ORCID record ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. information author Harrower, C. UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology enquiries@ceh.ac.uk https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5070-5293 ORCID record ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. information author Conway, R. Butterfly Conservation rconway@butterfly-conservation.org author Roy, D.B. UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology enquiries@ceh.ac.uk https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5147-0331 ORCID record ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. information author Botham, M.S. UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology enquiries@ceh.ac.uk https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5276-1405 ORCID record ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. information pointOfContact UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology enquiries@ceh.ac.uk owner Butterfly Conservation info@butterfly-conservation.org owner Natural Environment Research Council communications@ukri.org owner British Trust for Ornithology info@bto.org owner Joint Nature Conservation Committee math2@ceh.ac.uk owner NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre info@eidc.ac.uk custodian NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre info@eidc.ac.uk publisher Environmental Monitoring Facilities theme GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0 2008-06-01 publication butterfly GEMET - Concepts, version 4.1.3 2019-01-28 creation Biodiversity Monitoring and observation systems England Northern Ireland Scotland UK-SCAPE Wales otherRestrictions no limitations otherRestrictions This resource is available under the terms of the Open Government Licence otherRestrictions 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. otherRestrictions If you reuse this data, you should cite: Botham, M.S., Middlebrook, I., Harrower, C., Conway, R., Roy, D.B. (2023). United Kingdom Butterfly Monitoring Scheme: site indices 2022. NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre https://doi.org/10.5285/bdffdd79-7744-4d48-9f4f-d77a3ab98573 textTable English utf8 biota 2022-04-01 2022-09-30 -8.648 1.768 49.864 60.861 Comma-separated values (CSV) NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre info@eidc.ac.uk distributor https://data-package.ceh.ac.uk/data/bdffdd79-7744-4d48-9f4f-d77a3ab98573 Download the data Download a copy of this data download https://data-package.ceh.ac.uk/sd/bdffdd79-7744-4d48-9f4f-d77a3ab98573.zip Supporting information Supporting information available to assist in re-use of this dataset information dataset dataset 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 2010-12-08 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.