This is a recording form for lists of plant gall records from a single site, date, and recorder. They will feed into the British Plant Gall Society Recording Scheme. Importantly, the form includes bespoke fields for host plant and other associated organisms (e.g. inquilines, parasitoids and predators). We are in the process of setting up a network of regional verifiers across Britain; if a verifier is not active in your region then hopefully there will be one in the near future. Your records will help to build up our knowledge about gall-causer distributions, ecology, and conservation imperatives.
For identifying gall-causers, we recommend the excellent illustrated keys in British Plant Galls (3rd edition) by Margaret Redfern, Peter Shirley and Michael Bloxham. Updates to the keys are published periodically by Sam Buckton in the 'Files' section of the British Plant Galls Facebook group, which is also a supportive learning community and a great place to obtain identifications of galls you're unsure about. Updates will also be published on the British Plant Gall Society website in the near future.
See also the in-progress checklist of British gall-causer species, which includes advice about recording grades and information about species' national scarcity and recording/conservation priority status. Further information about galls, including a treasure trove of photos, is available elsewhere on the Society's website.
We recommend subscribing to the British Plant Gall Society in order to receive the Society's journal Cecidology, which is the world's only journal dedicated to plant galls. It features articles at the forefront of the fast-moving world of cecidology in Britain and beyond.