Blogtober Twenty

Today is International Sloth Day, and as I'm feeling a bit under the weather, I think I can appreciate the sentiment. Funnily enough, one of the recent cards I received did feature this somewhat less than energetic creature. I can't think why.

One evening at the end of September, I completely forgot about a Zoom meeting for the staff and area coordinators of the British Dragonfly Society Scotland. I was mortified, despite not having many species of dragon and not much to add at such meetings. I mention this because one of the actions to come out of the evening was to look at 10km (hectad) squares with few or no records to understand why this should be.

I must point out that the world of biological recording relies heavily on squares of varying sizes to understand the distributions of plants and animals, which then informs conservation actions. For instance, before I moved to Orkney, I helped the Buckinghamshire Dragonfly recorder (aka Alan) with 10km square data for the BDS Atlas which was published in 2014.

In Orkney, it being an archipelago of 70 islands, I have never looked at the map from the perspective of these hectads, but rather by each island. I reasoned that there will be very few people submitting records for the blue bits on the map, and even fewer dragonflies for them to see there. From memory, I think there has been one boat-related record in the Orkney database.

I have been sent a couple of Excel spreadsheets and a screen grab showing coloured squares for the whole of Scotland, which is on a completely different level to the A4 binder full of bits of cut-up maps of Buckinghamshire which I used back in the day.

Old school method

So my immediate future would seem to involve figuring out a mechanism to collate the Orkney records by hectad, rather than the other umpteen copies of spreadsheets I have: by date: by island; by recorder; by species.

And, yes, I am secretly looking forward to it.

Orkney and its 10km squares