16 June 2025

We received a request from Jodey Peyton at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). Her colleague Stelios Katsanevakis is leading a large EU Project GuardIAS on invasive alien species and is collating records of IAS of Union Concern (or species that may be added) from the UK but are unpublished. By unpublished they mean records that:

• Have not been made available in published papers. They may have been used in studies, but the georeferenced data were not included in tables or supplementary material.
• Are not accessible through international databases such as GBIF, EASIN, or iNaturalist. They may exist in national databases or websites or social media but lack visibility to the global community (e.g. in languages other than English or are not easily discoverable via search engines).
• Correspond to specific sites and times different from previously reported records. For instance, the species may be known from a site, but you have more recent observations confirming its continued presence. Such temporal updates are important for understanding the progression of invasions and the (in)effectiveness of management measures.

If you have records of any of the species of interest that you are able and willing to share for this project then please enter them in the  Excel template downloadable from the following link and email them directly to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.; also contact her if you have further questions.

Union Concern - Unpublished species Master template.xlsx

Dear all,

We are preparing a collective article, with contributions from hundreds of authors, to compile unpublished records of invasive alien species (IAS) of Union Concern across all environments. I am serving as the national coordinator for UK, responsible for inviting colleagues who may be interested in contributing relevant records.

All contributors will be listed as co-authors of the resulting data paper. Previous efforts of this kind—though limited to marine species and a narrower geographic scope—have proven highly successful, such as:

• Unpublished Mediterranean records of marine alien and cryptogenic species (126 co-authors, >5,300 records, 162 citations)
• Unpublished Mediterranean and Black Sea records of marine alien, cryptogenic, and neonative species (173 authors, >12,600 records, 46 citations)

Geo-referenced records of IAS are critically important for tracking invasion dynamics, identifying ecological requirements, and modelling current and future distributions. After publication, the dataset will be submitted to GBIF and EASIN.

I have attached a DarwinCore-compliant template for data entry, requiring just 8 fields per record (e.g., species name, coordinates, country, year). We kindly ask that all contributions be submitted by the end of June.

Feel free to share this invitation with other colleagues who may have relevant records to submit.

Best regards,

Jodey

21 October 2024

Your profile is a great way to tell other pan-species listers all about yourself. You can easily get to anyone's profile by clicking the person icon to the left of their name on the rankings or milestones, or by clicking their name on the full list of PSL listers. This will display all their lists but there are three other tabs: Contact Details, Additional Information and Biological Recording. To edit any of these (or your photo and header banner photo), just click ‘Edit’ and then 'Update your details'.

The Additional Information tab is really worth filling out–use this to talk about where you live, what you do for a living, links to blogs, what you most want to see etc. The format is similar to the old website but for some reason, uptake has been lower on the new site (around 20%) despite it looking much better and being easier to use. Some of the younger listers were particularly keen to learn about the older listers and be inspired by their career choices, for example. Therefore, we are encouraging people to spend just 10 minutes filling in your profile if you could. It’s great to be able to put a face to a name too.

I’ve recently updated my page to talk about the “PSL Sussex” WhatsApp group and if anyone else is running something similar in a different region or county, this (and the Facebook group) is a great place to advertise it. I’ve also added in some stuff on my recent discoveries regarding neurodivergence and a link to the book. These are all just examples of the sort of thing you could put here.

Under the heading Biological Recording we have added some new fields recently. The first is for the number of biological records you have made. This is then summed on the front page in the Statistics box. It’s great to see currently 3.7 million records by just 37 pan-species listers (just 12% of those on the main rankings) but do please add your totals here if you have not. The power of this statistic really works when as many of us contribute as possible and keep it fresh and up to date. The second involves a place to let people know if you have been fortunate enough to find any species new to the British Isles or United Kingdom: see that article for full details.

Your personal webpage link is of the form panspecieslisting.com/profile/<you>.html. You can personalise the '<you>' from the 'profile link' on the Contact Details tab, so I'm at https://panspecieslisting.com/profile/graeme.html.

07 October 2024

If you are familiar with the concept of biological recording then read on but, if you are new to it and want to learn more, then have a look at What is Biological Recording? before reading about a few updates we have planned.

As many of you will have seen, over the last few months I have been asking you for info, via the Facebook Group and/or direct contact, on the total number of records you have digitised over your life time.

Why are we doing this? Two reasons:

1. To show what the collective recording effort of pan-species listers is. We won’t be having a “recording rankings”, just a place on your profile (under ‘Biological Recording’) to enter a single total for your digitised records and the date you entered it. This will then collate into one single figure that will appear in the ‘Statistics’ box on the home page and will show something like “3,792,544 records collated by 35 listers”. We have taken the liberty of adding the totals you have provided to me already on to your profiles: if you are unhappy with this, you can edit/remove the figure easily, but please consider keeping it as it will greatly add weight to what we are doing. I think this total is pretty darn amazing and the fact that we rival a LERC already is incredible; as an example, Sussex Biodiversity Records Centre currently holds over 11.2 million records submitted by more than 1,200 recorders. We have generated over a third of that total with only 3% of the recorders!
2. To encourage better record keeping among pan-listers, especially with so many new people joining from a more birding background over the last year. This seemed like a great opportunity to bring biological recording into the heart of what we are doing and by having this accumulative total that will grow over time (and that we can all add too–no matter if it’s half a million records or a handful), we can all contribute. I expect I will update mine at least annually and we hope that everyone will do this. I’ll send out regular reminders when I update my record total, which for me is at the end of March/start of April each year before fieldwork commences in earnest, but you could update as often as you like.

Ideally, these records are then further shared to places like iRecord, local record centres and/or recording schemes. My working principle is, that anyone who goes to such lengths as to digitise a lifetime’s worth of natural history experiences, will want those records shared and used as much as possible. However, we accept that there are sometimes contractual and logistical limitations to this, so that some of your records will be pending submission. Don’t worry about excluding those, just provide a total of everything you have digested, they’ll find their way into wider use eventually.

It's fairly easy for me as I can just get the figure from my Recorder 6 database but you might have records in Excel, iRecord, iNaturalist, with one or more LRCs, BirdTrack, etc. Or all of the above. In which case, rough figures will do fine. Whatever works. If you have years’ worth of data in notebooks, this is a gentle encouragement to get that digitised and shared! And if you pan-species list but don’t record, well hopefully this is the start of an exciting chapter in your life where you start biological recording.

Although it’s hugely important that biological records are submitted and used more widely, we accept that that’s not the only reason to record. Recording itself is greatly beneficial to the individual making the records–adding a level of structure and rigour to a lifetime’s worth of effort. My personal enjoyment from generating my own species maps daily in my #speciesaday feature on X/Twitter, is as much for me to gain insight into my own records (such as revealing distributions of species I was unaware of, or highlight glaring gaps in my recording) as it is to inspire others. Biological recording is brilliant fun and hugely worthwhile for many different reasons but you’ll get the most out it, and more importantly nature will get the most out if it, if you do share them somewhere where others can use the. And doing so means, they are likely to still be of value in perpetuity, I take great comfort knowing my records will still be used long after I am gone.

We are also going to have a place for you to add the total number of species you have recorded new to Britain (and Ireland, Isle of Man and Channel Isles!) on your profile, which will again add up to form a collective total on the front page. We’ll display the figures together to look something like “3,792,544 records collated by 35 listers, including 204 species new to the British Isles”.

There are clearly many different levels of contribution towards a first for the British Isles–don’t get too hung up on this, whether you found it and identified it alone, as part of a group or identified it from someone else: these all count. We’ll also leave a space for you to list your species and provide a bit more info. It’s expected that multiple people might claim the same species and this is totally fine. We expect that we’ll have to do some editing of the final total to reflect this, but this won’t affect your total. If there are any reasons why a species you’ve had new to Britain might be shared by other people/listers, please highlight that on your list of species. My four species were fairly clear cut as being my records alone but a recent bug I had new to the British Isles on Jersey is an example where things might get difficult. Someone else can claim this when it eventually turns up in the UK and that’s fine, we’ll edit the total to reflect this. When a new species turns up and spreads rapidly, multiple people might find it in the same year but in these situations, one person is likely to have found it first and in those cases, they alone should really claim that record, unless you made some other significant contribution to its identification.

07 October 2024

Pan-species Listing and Biological Recording

The path to becoming a successful pan-species lister requires developing skills in observation and study as an all-round naturalist. This brings numerous personal benefits, but there is also a serious side to it in helping build a detailed collective understanding of our wildlife and its associated threats. To be able to effectively direct conservation actions it is necessary to know where species are, or were present. The most efficient way to know that is to collect, and share widely, detailed biological records. Hence we would encourage all those who enjoy pan-species listing to not just maintain their personal PSL list on this site, but also collect and share biological records with the relevant organisations.

The sections below describe what is involved with biological recording, and how to share your records.

Biological Records

Biological recording is the scientific study of the distribution of living organisms.

Biological records describe the presence, abundance, associations and changes, both in time and space, of wildlife.

At a minimum, four attributes define a biological record:

• What: the organism (typically species, sometimes other taxonomic levels e.g. genus, family, subspecies) that is being recorded
• Where: the location (typically OS grid reference, or latitude and longitude) where the organism was present
• When: the date (ideally including time, but potentially less precise, e.g. month) when the organism was present
• Who: the person (ideally) or organisation, that recorded (or determined) the organism

Example Biological Record

Here is an example of the same biological record from both iRecord and the NBN Atlas.

Each of the main attributes can also vary in resolution, with more precise values being more useful. See https://biologicalrecording.co.uk/recordresolution/ for how resolution can vary for:

• What: e.g. species or genus
• Where: e.g. 8-figure or 4-figure grid reference (preferably with site name as well to help detect errors)
• When: e.g. date or year
• Who: e.g. individual or recording group

Additional data attributes make a biological record, or species occurrence record, more useful. In particular:

• Why: a reason that the organism was at the location at that time (e.g. breeding, roosting, feeding)
• How many: some measure of abundance (e.g. number of individuals, percentage cover)
• How: the method that was used to generate the record (e.g. visual observation, light-trap, sound-recording, DNA)

Other important attributes potentially include life stage, sex, habitat, behaviour, etc. See https://biologicalrecording.co.uk/dataquality/ for examples. 

How to Share Biological Records

For people who record across multiple taxonomic groups we'd recommend that you submit your data to iRecord, which is well set up for passing data on to those who need it. You can easily add a single record or a list of records. Alternatively, you can send your records direct to the various taxa-based National Schemes and Societies. As PSLers we can all contribute a wealth of valuable data to aid conservation in this country simply by submitting as many of our records as possible so that they get to whoever needs them.

^*Images reproduced with permission from Biological Recording Company © Keiron Derek Brown