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If you're ever out and about recording wildlife near Gatwick, Royal Tunbridge Wells, Lamberhurst, Union Street or east of Camber - this
blog post is for you!
We’re going to delve into a bit of the techie detail of wildlife
recording now. But hey, what is the internet for, if not to provide more detail about everything than you ever realised you wanted to know?
Most national recording schemes work by first collating and
scrutinising records at the county level and then forwarding all of this data
on to a national hub, where it is amalgamated into one big national dataset, for futher analysis. This is how the Butterfliesfor the New Millenium (BNM) national
butterfly recording scheme works. So I am the BNM local volunteer coordinator –
responsible for pulling all the Sussex butterfly records into our Sussex
sightings database – and, when I’ve managed to
get the whole year’s worth of data together, I send a copy to Richard Fox - the BNM national coordinator.
But for this system to work properly and provide a
comprehensive picture for the whole of the UK, we need to all agree on where
the county boundaries lie. Modern county boundaries are particularly unhelpful
in this regard – political whims and the ever-expanding nature of our towns and
cities lead to regular boundary changes – so we don’t use those. We use
Watsonian Vice Counties instead.
It’s elementary
Hewett Cotterell Watson (a man whose wikipedia entry is worth reading) devised the Vice County System of Great Britain in 1852, initially as a means of graphically representing the distribution of plants. He defined 112 Vice Counties of approximately equal areas, based on sub-divisions of counties. And it proved to be such a useful system it soon became popular for all forms of wildlife recording, as it still is to this day.
So when we talk about producing a new Sussex Butterfly Atlas - we are in fact talking about mapping the distribution of butterflies in the West Sussex and East Sussex Vice Counties, which are still identified by the numbers Watson gave them in 1852 - VC13 and VC14 respectively.
The Google Map embedded above - which you can click on to explore further - shows both the Vice County boundaries (in crimson) and the modern county boundaries (in grey). The main differences between the two are around:
- Gatwick - which is outside the Sussex Vice Counties boundary, although it's in the modern county of West Sussex;
- Royal Tunbridge Wells - some of which is inside the Sussex Vice Counties boundary, although the modern county boundary now traces the southern edge of the town;
- Lamberhurst - there's a big area south of here which is inside the Sussex Vice Counties boundary, although not in the modern county of East Sussex;
- Union Street (east of Ticehurst) - there's another big area here which is outside the Sussex Vice Counties boundary, although it's in the modern county of East Sussex;
- Camber - there's an area east of here which is outside the Sussex Vice Counties boundary, although it's in the modern county of East Sussex; and
- the East Sussex / West Sussex county boundary, which is in a totally different place - but you probably don't need to worry about that.
Please send us all your butterfly sightings for Ye Olde Sussex!
And if you happen to venture over the border you can find contact details for our neighbouring BNM local coordinators here - they will be happy to receive your butterfly records I am sure!
The West Sussex (VC13) and East Sussex (VC14) Watsonian Vice County boundaries are displayed under the terms of the OpenData initiative, courtesy of the National Biodiversity Network. The modern administrative boundaries for West Sussex and East Sussex are from the Boundary-Line dataset made available by OS OpenData. Displaying this data in Google Maps was more complicated that I'd bargained for, but made possible thanks to QGIS - the open source geographic information system software. Thank you internets!
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