Shifting Ground: The Ground Beetle Recording Scheme on iRecord

The Ground Beetle Recording Scheme has migrated: over 350,000 records spanning 220 years are now hosted on iRecord. Learn how iRecord is supporting Carabidae recording and take a tour through a few notable records both old and new.

Q&A with Chris Foster

Chris Foster has been coordinating the ground beetle recording scheme since 2019. He is also a lecturer in Animal Ecology at the University of Reading.

Are you hoping to expand your verification team?

Yes. We’re two verifiers at the moment but not currently active enough, we’ve have had some other offers of help but open to more from anyone who can confidently identify at least some ground beetles (we could for example divide the family up among verifiers)

Are there any county recorders for beetles in Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales?

There are in Scotland and Wales though lots of vacancies. The UK Coleoptera website keeps a list with contact details.

Do recorders submit records to you via methods other than iRecord?

We do get records submitted by spreadsheet, which we’re happy to accept provided the recorder is happy for that data to be imported into iRecord under the recording scheme’s username. We also import data into iRecord from iNaturalist.

How do you prioritise which records to tackle first when there is a backlog of records?

Prioritisation tends to be taxonomically biased i.e. which species are easiest to verify from photographs, occasionally also driven by requests for data on particular species of interest. Data from established reliable recorders also tends to be tackled sooner. If anyone has had ground beetle data sat waiting for verification for a long time please do get in touch.

Do you accept records that have written descriptions of a species in place of a photo?

We’re happy to have a look at written descriptions but they would need to be pretty detailed for the majority of species and we might ask for more details about the record (and the recorder’s experience)