Yesterday I recorded a red admiral, a speckled wood and a comma butterfly on the iRecord butterflies app. All were rejected by Chris White and I'm not sure why. I included photos, and all the required information.
The reason given was 'We do not think this is *butterfly name here* species' but all identifying tools confirmed that the species name is correct, and it seems odd that all 3 were wrong.
I wanted to help by recording sightings of butterflies in my area but it seems like a fair bit of effort to go to if everything is just going to get rejected.
Data Protection issue too?
During my recent training to become a Verification Assistant, we were instructed to not verify any records that could identify a recorder's home address as iRecord is a publicly-available database. Publishing the data that could indicate someone's home address would contravene the Data Protection Act. I query the records so that the location description can be changed & then verify.
As far as I know, the location description is just for cross-referencing against the grid reference on the record. On my own Butterfly App records, I use my village name & "garden" as the location description to cross reference to the grid reference.
Don't be discouraged... I have experience of recording in two home areas now over the past few years, in Fife & North Wales plus a few more areas when on holiday, in the Lake District, mid Wales & Breconshire with no issues yet.
My last point is you don't need photos except when you're new to recording, for new species recorded by you (so that the County Recorder/Verification Assistant becomes more confident in your ID skills), for rarer species & for species not usually found in that area. The system tells us whether you've recorded that particular species before (& whether those records were verified as correct or not) & whether the species has been recorded in that 10km area before.
verifying location
"As far as I know, the location description is just for cross-referencing against the grid reference on the record".
This is important as it is very easy to make an error when entering grid references. I recently submitted an insect record and accidentally gave the first two letters of the grid reference as SP rather than SE. As a result the spot indicated by the grid reference I gave was some 200 kilometres from the spot where I saw the insect! As it happened I spotted the mistake myself and corrected it but if I had not, the fact that I also gave a recognisable location name as well as the grid ref would have allowed the recorder to spot the error.
Hi. This sounded a bit strange so I had a look - I assume you are Steph (if not I found the wrong set of records!)? The records were rejected as unable to verify, and the comment Chris has left is "Thank you for submitting your record. Unfortunately we are unable to accept this record because there is no verifiable location given other than the grid reference." So although the species ID is correct, tthe reason for the rejection is that the location name is "my garden". Although there is a grid reference/lat long coordinates that allow plotting on a map, county recorders will usually want to be able to tell where a location is from the text field - if records were accepted from recorders under the name my garden on a database it might look like there was one amazing site with a huge number of records. What I would recommend is in future recording them using the name of your town (there is no need to be too specific e.g. road names etc) and then they should be accepted without a problem.