Pan-Species Listing (PSL) is an exciting initiative encouraging naturalists to record ALL the species they have seen in the UK in a friendly and competitive way that promotes general wildlife recording and biodiversity in the process. In this talk, Graeme Lyons will introduce the PSL approach, describe the benefits of the framework, and then take us on a whistle-stop tour of the relevant ‘groups’ of wildlife in the UK (how to get into them, where to start, etc.). The talk will be sprinkled with lots of nice photos and anecdotes from Graeme’s storied career as an entomologist and pan-species lister.
Q&A with Graeme Lyons
Graeme Lyons is a freelance entomologist and ecologist who spent 20 years working in the charitable sector before going fully freelance. He is a leading advocate of the pan-species listing movement and author of ‘Pan-species Listing: How to Become a Super-Naturalist’. The PSL approach treats all areas of natural history, as such Graeme’s interests are broad; beetles, bugs, birds, spiders, vascular plants, bryophytes, bees, molluscs (especially nudibranchs) and all marine groups, and more! Graeme is closing in on the 10,000 species mark (set reach it some point in 2026) – putting him in second place for the most species seen of anyone in the UK on PSL . A prolific biological recorder, Graeme manages a database of over 357,000 records making over 50,000 records annually, has recorded over 6,500 invertebrates in the British Isles and has probably seen more spiders in the UK than anyone (560 species).
1. For those who are just starting out with pan-species listing, what are some good ‘groups’ of wildlife to focus on?
I appreciate pan-species listing can seem quite overwhelming when you’re starting out. I always say the most important thing when choosing a group to focus on is to take the path of least resistance. By that I mean choose a group of that really interests and excites you. If you do that the whole endeavour will be self-sustaining. In contrast, if you force yourself to get into a group you’re not really enthusiastic about (I’ve always struggled with lichens, sorry lichenologists!), it will be an uphill battle. Similarly, if you spread yourself too thin, you’ll miss out on the satisfaction of approaching mastery in any one area. Pan-species listing is a lifetime project – you can absolutely take groups one by one.
2. Should you only count a species on your list if you have a photo of it, or is seeing the organism enough?
You absolutely do not need a photo of something to count it. I really worry about this actually; how online recording packages are pushing recorders down the photographic route. Yes it’s nice to have photographs, but to suggest you must photograph everything you record is ludicrous! Necessitating that recorders take photographs would massively slow down the rate of recording, especially amongst professional surveyors who are making upwards of 50,000 a year. It’s also for this reason I can’t put my support behind iNaturalist, where every record must include a photo, as opposed to something like iRecord. I believe pan-species listing and ultimately biological recording as a whole rely fundamentally on trust. Each recorder should be able to eventually reach a point at which the vast majority of their records can be accepted by the appropriate verifier based entirely on trust, without the need for any photos.
3. Is it necessary to have your records verified before you include them on your list?
No, it isn’t necessary. For a start, verification is simply not needed for every taxon – you don’t need someone else to verify that you’ve seen Human Homo sapiens or Daisy Bellis perennis or Robin Erithacus rubecula. Furthermore, verification relies on human volunteers and is therefore often slow. At extremes, for some groups of species there is nobody even tackling verification at the moment, so it’s effectively impossible to get records verified. That’s not to say verification is not an essential part of biological recording, but just to stress that pan-species listing is not a recording platform, it is is something you do for fun on top of being a recorder (‘as well as’, not ‘instead of’). You absolutely should endeavour to get your records verified, but if you want to include stuff on your pan-species list before its been verified, nobody is going to stop you.
4. Do you count species on your list if they’re dead (e.g. collected in a trap)?
For things like this it depends on personal preference. As a PSL community we used to have a list of ‘rules’ regarding what members should and should not tick. Over time we’ve drifted into calling these ‘guiding principles’, the intention being to recognise the fact that within PSL everyone is doing things slightly differently. The golden mantra of PSL is ‘your list, your rules’. Some pan-species listers only count species if they’ve seen them alive. Others will count anything alive or dead. My personal ruling lies somewhere in the middle. I wouldn’t count a dead bird, for example, but if I run a pitfall trap, set it up myself and identify the specimens myself, then I would tick the species. Some other listers may choose not to – that’s up to them. I also wouldn’t personally tick species I saw in a trap set up by someone else and identified by someone else. I think it’s important to have a significant degree of personal involvement in the collection, identification and recording of the species one ticks.
5. You mentioned in your talk that you’ve started doing long-term standardised surveys of rewilding sites in the south of England. What have these sorts of surveys taught you that casual ad-hoc recording wouldn’t have revealed?
A lot. Standardised surveys conducted for a set interval of time and repeated with rigour are a very powerful tool indeed. You can discern so much in terms of change in a landscape from this methodology. Admittedly, for most of the places I’m surveying I’m currently only on the second year of surveys, but even now I am already noticing changes. To give an example, in Blean, a rewilded ancient forest in Kent, which I recently surveyed for the second year in a row, the non-native Chestnut Gall Wasp Dryocosmus kuriphilus has gone from being totally absent to highly abundant (on every tree) in the space of six years. The speed at which new species are colonising and spreading through the UK (largely due to climate change) is bonkers.
Further Info
- Pan-Species Listing website: www.panspecieslisting.com
- Buy Graeme’s book here (25% off with the code BRC25): https://pelagicpublishing.com/products/pan-species-listing
- Graeme’s JustGiving page for 6000 species in 2026: https://www.justgiving.com/page/graeme-lyons-3
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