I've just taken on a new role as Verification Assistant for Butterfly Conservation. There are records from the Garden Butterfly Survey with species name "Pieris", not a full species name (& therefore no Common name) & no photo/notes.
How do other verifiers handle these records? Verify as Accepted, considered correct or Not accepted, unable to verify?
Thanks
Julia
Comments
Thanks James, very useful…
Thanks James, very useful advice.
It certainly is a steep learning curve after our course last year!
Thanks again
Julia
In answer to your question I do accept genus only records for my group (so without a photo if it was a common genus I'd go considered correct) but then exclude them from certain analysis.
I suspect that these records are referring to white butterflies flying throug the garden, so not enough of a good view to separate Small/Green-veined, or get a photo to confirm. How you verify them will partly depend on how the statistics are analysed - for example if you are looking at how many species occur in a garden on average in 2023 then a White sp. can count as 1, whereas for other things non-species IDs might not be useful. I would recommend having a look to see how other BC verifiers/county recorders treat them and take a stear from that. Also you could consider 'plausible' as a status. That means they don't go into the main database as they are not accepted, but they are kept separate from the not accepted (wrong, not enough evidence etc) categories in case you or someone else ever wanted to revisit them.