While verifying beetle records, I recently came across two records from the French Alps, well outside the area iRecord is designed for.
How do I treat such records? And what do I write to the recorder in case they start arguing?
Do I reject every record coming from outside the British Isles and Channel Islands, or simply ignore them and leave them unverified? So far, I only came across these two.
I can think of two potential problems these records may cause: They may necessitate the inclusion of many more taxa into the iRecord database, even species that have never been found in the British Isles, somewhat defeating the whole point of having a drop-down list including only the "relevant" ones. Plus they might create issues with the import into NBN? At the very least, they're confusing. Species that are extinct in Britain would pop up again with recent records in the database, and the fact that they were recorded outside of Britain may not be that obvious.
Thanks!
Michael
Hi Michael, iRecord itself is not promoted for use outside the UK (although the underlying software is used by some sites elsewhere in the world), and the species dictionary only has the UK species. But as you say we do occasionally get records added from elsewhere. For the recording scheme that I'm involved with I reject the non-UK records as I don't know the fauna well enough outside the UK. I realise that you probably do know the wider fauna though, so it's up to you if you wish to accept the records. We do not pass records from outside the UK to NBN Atlas, not to GBIF as the moment, and we sometimes advise people to add non-UK records to iNaturalist as an alternative (especially when rejecting them on iRecord).