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United Kingdom Butterfly Monitoring Scheme: site indices data 2015 version 2

[THIS DATASET HAS BEEN WITHDRAWN]. Site indices, as a relative measure of the actual population size, 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 actual 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 accurate indices of abundance cannot currently be 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 are calculated for almost 1,500 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 in 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. Although the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) and Butterfly Conservation (BC) are responsible for the calculation and interpretation of site indices, the collection of the data used in its creation is ultimately reliant on a large volunteer community. The UKBMS is run by BC, the CEH and the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), in partnership with the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC), and supported and steered by Forestry Commission (FC), Natural England (NE), Natural Resources Wales (NRW), Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA), and Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH). The UKBMS is indebted to all volunteers who contribute data to the scheme. Full details about this dataset can be found at https://doi.org/10.5285/cec0fd19-688b-4e3e-8332-cf6506bb4612

Simple

Date (Publication)
2016-11-14
Citation identifier
https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/id/cec0fd19-688b-4e3e-8332-cf6506bb4612
Citation identifier
doi: / 10.5285/cec0fd19-688b-4e3e-8332-cf6506bb4612
Other citation details

Botham, M., Roy, D., Brereton, T., Middlebrook, I. (2016). United Kingdom Butterfly Monitoring Scheme: site indices data 2015 version 2. NERC Environmental Information Data Centre 10.5285/cec0fd19-688b-4e3e-8332-cf6506bb4612

Point of contact
Organisation name Individual name Electronic mail address Role
UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology

UKBMS

enquiries@ceh.ac.uk

Point of contact
Butterfly Conservation

info@butterfly-conservation.org

Point of contact
NERC Environmental Information Data Centre

info@eidc.ac.uk

Publisher
NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre

info@eidc.ac.uk

Custodian
Centre for Ecology & Hydrology Botham, M.

enquiries@ceh.ac.uk

Author
Centre for Ecology & Hydrology Roy, D.

enquiries@ceh.ac.uk

Author
Butterfly Conservation

Brereton, T.

info@butterfly-conservation.org

Author
Butterfly Conservation

Middlebrook, I.

info@butterfly-conservation.org

Author
Maintenance and update frequency
Not planned

GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0

  • Environmental Monitoring Facilities

Access constraints
Other restrictions
Other constraints

Superseded

Use constraints
Other restrictions
Other constraints
Licence terms and conditions apply
Use constraints
Other restrictions
Other constraints

If you reuse this data, you should cite: Botham, M., Roy, D., Brereton, T., Middlebrook, I. (2016). United Kingdom Butterfly Monitoring Scheme: site indices data 2015 version 2. NERC Environmental Information Data Centre https://doi.org/10.5285/cec0fd19-688b-4e3e-8332-cf6506bb4612

Spatial representation type
Text, table
Language
English
Character set
UTF8
Topic category
  • Biota
Begin date
1976-04-01
End date
2015-12-31
N
S
E
W
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Unique resource identifier
OSGB 1936 / British National Grid
Distribution format
Name Version

Comma-separated values (CSV)

Distributor contact
Organisation name Individual name Electronic mail address Role

NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre

info@eidc.ac.uk

Distributor
OnLine resource
Protocol Linkage Name
https://data-package.ceh.ac.uk/sd/cec0fd19-688b-4e3e-8332-cf6506bb4612.zip

Supporting information

Hierarchy level
Dataset
Other

dataset

Conformance result

Title

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

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
cec0fd19-688b-4e3e-8332-cf6506bb4612 XML
Metadata language
English
Character set
8859 Part 1
Hierarchy level
Dataset
Hierarchy level name

dataset

Date stamp
2025-04-09T08:43:51
Metadata standard name
UK GEMINI
Metadata standard version

2.3

Metadata author
Organisation name Individual name Electronic mail address Role
NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre

info@eidc.ac.uk

Point of contact
 
 

Overviews

Spatial extent

thumbnail

Keywords

GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0

Environmental Monitoring Facilities


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