Hi folks, just looking through my (admittedly short) list I have noticed a few records have not been confirmed. I accept that S. nobilis is a diffcult one to identify, but a male Stag Beetle? Also we have Diphyus quadripunctorius that overwinters in some mines our club takes care of for the National trust, and again, the record remains waiting for approval.
Is there a reason for this?
Thanks
*appologies to mods this is in the wrong part of the forum*
Pending records
I have several dragonfly records pending for North Somerset which were submitted over a month ago. I realise that these records are considered by people in their spare time, but I wonder if North Somerset is vacant at the moment?
There appears to still be a VC recorder for North Somerset
Somerset appears to still have a county recorder who covers both vice-counties, called Chris Iles. He is set up on iRecord but appears to have last verified a batch of records in January, so I would suggest that your records will probably be verified over the winter rather than as they get added.
The short answer is that not all groups in all counties are currently verified, and not all verifiers check records as they come in - it has no link to how distinctive a species is. The verifiers are all volunteers so understandably there are many gaps in coverage and expertise. The records are safe on iRecord until a verifier does get to them.
With regards to your specific examples, currently the national Spider Recording Scheme do not verify iRecord records (although some counties might have a local verifier) although apparently there are plans for them to do more at some point. There are various different beetle recording schemes, so that might get verified eventually, but some verifiers will choose to do their verifications once a year so it might take a while. Some ichneumons do get verified on an ad-hoc basis.