This article is about accessing data collected by the British Dragonfly Society Recording Scheme. We believe in Open Data and are keen that the records we collect and curate are used widely to inform conservation management, development planning, species & ecological studies and climate change research. To these ends we publish to the National Biodiversity Network Atlas (NBN Atlas) from where it may be accessed freely.

We reprocess the data from our entry, maintenance and verification system iRecord, hosted for us by the Biological Records Centre (BRC), to give the records a more consistent format and filter out those that do not make the grade.

Records from some iRecord sources arrive with a licence type that is not sufficiently ‘open’. An example is the Creative Commons NonCommercial licence (CC BY-NC), as used by default for iNaturalist records. We do not pass these, and other restrictively licenced records, to NBN Atlas. We are making efforts to persuade recorders to adopt the Creative Commons by Attribution (CC BY) licence type.

 

Accessing the NBN Atlas

NBN Atlas is a natural world data aggregator for the UK. It facilitates searching, listing, mapping, correlating and downloading. Some features, including downloading of records, require an account.
We recommend you restrict your reviews of Odonata (dragonflies & damselflies) to our data resource because there are other resources on NBN Atlas that have not received the same degree of checking (“verification”). In particular, occurrence maps can be significantly distorted by plotting only a few incorrect records.

Use these links to find our data on NBN Atlas:

• Home: https://nbnatlas.org/
• BDS Data Resource: https://registry.nbnatlas.org/public/show/dr731

The resource page shows the latest information (metadata) about the data resource, including the date range, when it was uploaded and any known issues with the data.

 

Accessing the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)

The same data resource that we send to NBN Atlas is passed on to GBIF. As the name suggests, this is a natural world data aggregator for the globe. Some features, including downloading of records, require an account.
Use these links to find our data on GBIF:

• Home: https://www.gbif.org/
• BDS Data Resource: https://www.gbif.org/dataset/search?q=british%20dragonfly%20society