Team Wilder Citizen wildlife reporting resource

Green spaces are invaluable resources for local people, their wellbeing, and the wildlife coexisting in these areas. With green spaces (particularly those that do not receive formal designations as Special Sites of Scientific Interest, or Local Nature Reserves) often being under threat from changes in land use and development, it is important that the wildlife present is recorded, and ideally, recorded way before the areas are considered for development in the first place.

Local Environmental Record Centres (LERCs) across the country are the principal services that are used to inform planning applications, local plans and nature strategies, for directing funding and more. Whether you are a keen birder, into your invertebrates, love long walks or want to formalise the presence of hedgehogs and badgers in your area, wildlife recording can be done by anyone. There are 4 key things to remember when making any wildlife record:

1. Who
2. What
3. When
4. Where

In Avon, Bristol Regional Environmental Records Centre (BRERC) is the organisation responsible for collating, verifying and distributing wildlife records, and anyone can contribute records to BRERC. Whilst popular apps such as iNaturalist are fantastic resources for identifying what you’re looking at, the records they collect are rarely of value to local record centres, especially if users apply the apps’ anonymity features. Therefore, Avon Wildlife Trust champions citizen scientists submitting records directly .

1. You can create an account for the BRERC website here, and follow the instructions on the home page. You’ll need to be verified before you can submit records
2. Once your account is created, you can report individual sightings such as a group of 7 hedgehogs, or a single red kite, to this page: Submit a sighting | BRERC Online Recording.
3. If you wish to do more of a survey, and collate many different sightings or species, there are a variety of forms you can print off or download here: BRERC Recording Forms which vary slightly based on whether you are going birding, looking at botany, or doing a general mixed survey of everything you find.
4. Please submit the e-forms, or photos of printed record sheets to the email inbox records@brerc.org.uk.

Apps such as Nature Finder, Big Butterfly Count, Merlin Bird ID, iNaturalist, and PlantNet are all good ways of narrowing down what you’re looking at or listening to, and it helps to include a photo with any sightings on the BRERC recording website so they can be verified.

For botanical guides, a Collins Flowers Guide or Francis Rose’s Wildflower Key are good places to start. Record Pool  is a service run specifically for amphibian and reptiles, and is great for recording toads, frogs, newts and their spawns. All records sent here are also fed back to LERCs, but also help Amphibian Reptile Group UK. 

iNaturalist is fine to use, but please note… If you do wish to use iNaturalist and want your records to be useful, please ensure you do not anonymise the data, do not obscure the location, make sure you manually enter the location details, and change your licensing settings from the default to CC0. These are all features that make records usable for LERCs.