Biological Records Centre

Last updated
Biological Records Centre
AbbreviationBRC
Formation1964;59 years ago (1964)
Legal statusUnit within the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology
Location
  • Maclean Building, Crowmarsh Gifford, Oxfordshire, OX10 8BB
Region
United Kingdom
Head
Dr David Roy
Affiliations Centre for Ecology and Hydrology
Website www.brc.ac.uk

The Biological Records Centre (BRC) established in 1964, is a national focus in the UK for terrestrial and fresh water species recording. [1]

Contents

The term "biological records centre" is also used in the context of local centres, now frequently referred to as "local environmental records centres" (LERCs).

History

The Biological Records Centre (BRC) was set up in 1964 by the Nature Conservancy (UK) at its recently opened Monks Wood Experimental Station near Huntingdon. [1] BRC developed from the Atlas of the British Flora project of the Botanical Society of the British Isles (BSBI) to map the distribution of British (and Irish) flowering plants, [2] [3] which had established basic principles for biological recording in the UK. The former BSBI project leader, Franklyn Perring, established BRC with the project's original data and data processing equipment.

Function

As part of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), BRC provides a focus for the collation, management, dissemination and interpretation of species observations (biological records). [4] BRC is now based at UKCEH's Wallingford site, near Oxford. Most records are collected by volunteer recording schemes and societies, which are integral to the work of BRC. [5] These activities are supported through a long-term funding partnership between the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), which is now part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC).

Activities

Together with more than 80 recording schemes and societies, [6] BRC supports biological recording for a wide range of plant and animal groups. [1] BRC helps the recording community to publish atlases, [7] datasets [8] and other online resources, providing information for research, policy and the conservation of wildlife. Through the use of technology BRC helps to harness the enthusiasm and knowledge of naturalists and to enable them to collate and analyse their records. To celebrate the BRC's 50th Anniversary, a special issue of the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society was published with 23 research and review articles covering the centre's work. [9]

In addition to its work with recording schemes and societies, BRC has played a key role in the greater integration of biological recording activities in the UK, most recently through the National Biodiversity Network (NBN). BRC helped to found the National Federation for Biological Recording (NFBR) in 1986 and carried out much of the survey and analysis for the report of the Coordinating Commission for Biological Recording (CCBR) published in 1995, [10] both of which helped shape the future of biological recording in the UK.

Local biological records centres

A network of local biological records centres or local environmental records centres (usually abbreviated to BRC, LRC or LERC,) covers most areas of the UK. All local centres are entirely independent of the Biological Records Centre. The first such local centre was the Natural History Record Bureau at what is now Tullie House Museum in Carlisle which opened in 1902. [11] As with many LERCs it grew out of the biological recording work of the local natural history society. [12] LERCs have a complementary role to BRC and recording schemes as systems "for collating biological data from a wide range of sources (including organisations and individuals), for ensuring that data are properly validated and catalogued, and for providing access to them, thereby acting as a focus for biological information." [13] Local Environmental Records Centres are non-profit, partnership-led organisations and typically organised on a county or multi-county basis. Increasingly they are becoming better networked through the activities of the Association of Local Environmental Records Centres, the National Biodiversity Network, Natural England, The Wildlife Trusts partnership and NFBR, which became the National Forum for Biological Recording in 2013. rECOrd is an example of a Local Environmental Records Centre.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vice-county</span> Biological recording division of the British Isles

A vice-county is a geographical division of the British Isles used for the purposes of biological recording and other scientific data-gathering. It is sometimes called a Watsonian vice-county as vice-counties were introduced for Great Britain, its offshore islands, and the Isle of Man, by Hewett Cottrell Watson who first used them in the third volume of his Cybele Britannica published in 1852. Watson's vice-counties were based on the ancient counties of Britain, but often subdividing these boundaries to create smaller, more uniform units, and considering exclaves to be part of the surrounding vice-county.

The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) is a British research council that supports research, training and knowledge transfer activities in the environmental sciences.

The biodiversity of Great Britain and Ireland is one of the most well-studied geographical areas of its size in the world. This biota work has resulted in the publication of distribution atlases for many taxonomic groups. This page lists these publications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology</span> UK government environmental science research organisation

The UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) is a centre for excellence in environmental science across water, land and air. The organisation has a long history of investigating, monitoring and modelling environmental change, and its science makes a difference in the world. The issues that its science addresses include: air pollution, biodiversity, chemical risks in the environment, extreme weather events, droughts, floods, greenhouse gas emissions, soil health, sustainable agriculture, sustainable ecosystems, water quality, and water resources management.

<i>Arabis hirsuta</i> Species of plant

Arabis hirsuta, known as hairy rock-cress, is a flowering plant of the genus Arabis in the family Brassicaceae. In previous North American works, this species has been broadly defined to include plants native to Europe, Asia, and the northern half of North America, but is now more often restricted to a narrower subgroup restricted to Europe.

The National Biodiversity Network (UK) (NBN) is a collaborative venture set up in 2000 in the United Kingdom committed to making biodiversity information available through various media, including on the internet via the NBN Atlas—the data search website of the NBN.

rECOrd (Local Biological Records Centre)

rECOrd is a Local Biological Records Centre (LRC) serving Cheshire, Halton, Warrington and Wirral - 'The Cheshire region'. It provides a local facility for the storage, validation and usage of Cheshire-based biological data under the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) project. It is one of a number of local Biological Records Centres across Britain which together aim to give complete geographic coverage of the UK.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Index of biodiversity articles</span>

This is a list of topics in biodiversity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Katherine Willis, Baroness Willis of Summertown</span> British ecologist (born 1964)

Katherine Jane Willis, Baroness Willis of Summertown, is a British biologist, academic and life peer, who studies the relationship between long-term ecosystem dynamics and environmental change. She is Professor of Biodiversity in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, and an adjunct professor in biology at the University of Bergen. In 2018 she was elected Principal of St Edmund Hall, and took up the position from 1 October. She held the Tasso Leventis Chair of Biodiversity at Oxford and was founding Director, now Associate Director, of the Biodiversity Institute Oxford. Willis was Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew from 2013 to 2018. Her nomination by the House of Lords Appointments Commission as a crossbench life peer was announced on 17 May 2022.

<i>Potamogeton acutifolius</i> Species of plant

Potamogeton acutifolius is a European species of aquatic plant in the family Potamogetonaceae, known by the common name sharp-leaved pondweed. It is threatened and declining in at least part of its range.

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. There has been a long tradition of biological recording in the United Kingdom dating back to John Ray (1627–1705), Robert Plot (1640–1696) and their contemporaries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William J. Sutherland</span> Conservation biologist

William James Sutherland is the Miriam Rothschild Professor of Conservation Biology at the University of Cambridge. He has been the President of the British Ecological Society. He has been a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge since 2008.

Franklyn Hugh Perring PhD, OBE was a British naturalist, regarded as "one of the most influential botanists and nature conservationists of the 20th century".

<i>Hieracium naviense</i> Species of flowering plant

Hieracium naviense is a very rare species of hawkweed which has been given the common name of Derby hawkweed.

<i>Salix repens</i> Species of shrub

Salix repens, the creeping willow, is a small, shrubby species of willow in the family Salicaceae, growing up to 1.5 metres in height. Found amongst sand dunes and heathlands, it is a polymorphic species, with a wide range of variants. In the UK, at least, these range from small, prostrate, hairless plants at one end of the spectrum to taller, erect or ascending silky-leaved shrubs at the other. This wide variation in form has resulted in numerous synonyms.

Helen Elizabeth Roy, is a British ecologist, entomologist, and academic, specialising in aphids and non-native species. Since 2007, she has been a principal scientist and ecologist at the NERC's Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. From 1997 to 2008, she taught at Anglia Ruskin University, rising to the rank of Reader in Ecology. She is the co-organiser of the UK Ladybird Survey, alongside Dr Peter Brown, is a visiting professor in the School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading and is a past President of the Royal Entomological Society.

Jane Memmott Hon.FRES is an ecologist and entomologist from the United Kingdom. She is professor of ecology at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on community ecology and she is an expert on the interactions between insect pollinators and plants.

<i>Orobanche reticulata</i> Species of flowering plant

Orobanche reticulata is a species of broomrape known by the common name thistle broomrape. It is a parasitic plant whose host is normally the creeping thistle. It is native to the lowlands of Western Europe and Central Asia, but in the United Kingdom it is a rare and protected plant, growing only in Yorkshire, on grassland sites such as Quarry Moor.

<i>Rumex rupestris</i> Species of flowering plant

Rumex rupestris, commonly known as shore dock, is a species of flowering plant belonging to the family Polygonaceae. Its native range is Western Europeand is one of the world's rarest dock species.

Bridget Emmett is a British ecologist, Professor and Science Area Head for the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. She is the President of British Ecological Society from 2024.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Roy, Helen E.; Preston, Christopher D.; Roy, David B. (July 2015). "Fifty years of the Biological Records Centre". Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. 115 (3): 469–474. doi: 10.1111/bij.12575 .
  2. ↑ Perring, Franklyn; Walters, Max (1993). Atlas of the British flora (3. ed., repr. ed.). [London]: Botanical Society of the British Isles. ISBN   978-0-901158-19-2.
  3. ↑ Preston, Christopher D. (April 2013). "Following the BSBI's lead: the influence of the Atlas of the British flora, 1962-2012" (PDF). New Journal of Botany. 3 (1): 2–14. doi:10.1179/2042349713Y.0000000020. S2CID   55694686.
  4. ↑ Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (2015-11-27). "Biological Records Centre" . Retrieved 10 February 2016.
  5. ↑ Pocock, Michael J. O.; Roy, Helen E.; Preston, Chris D.; Roy, David B. (July 2015). "The Biological Records Centre: a pioneer of citizen science". Biological Journal of the Linnean Society. 115 (3): 475–493. doi: 10.1111/bij.12548 .
  6. ↑ "Biological Records Centre - Recording Schemes". Biological Records Centre. Retrieved 2013-09-19.
  7. ↑ Biological Records Centre. "Atlases" . Retrieved 10 February 2016.
  8. ↑ Biological Records Centre. "Datasets" . Retrieved 10 February 2016.
  9. ↑ Biological Journal of the Linnean Society115 (3), Pages 469–784. July 2015.
  10. ↑ Burnett, J., Copp, C., Harding, P. (1995) Biological Recording in the United Kingdom Present practice and future development Summary Report, Coordinating Commission for Biological Recording available from download from Natural Environment Research Council
  11. ↑ The Natural History Record Bureau at the Carlisle Museum, The Museums Journal 10 (6). December 1910.
  12. ↑ "History | CBDC". Cumbria Biodiversity Data Centre, Tullie House Museum. Accessed 2013-09-19.
  13. ↑ Running a Local Record Centre, The Wildlife Trusts/NBN. 2001.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.