Curves are In this Season - part one

In software such as Recorder 6, you can plot seasonal patterns in records of a species. But what if you want more flexibility over what records are included or to display species phenology (phenology is the change in the timing of natural events)? You could while away a PhD exploring data in this way with all kinds of different methods (well, I could) but I thought I'd blog about some graphs I made to illustrate a talk on dragonflies given by the Cumbria odonata recorder at Carlisle Natural History Society earlier this year. This isn't a detailed how-to guide, more an attempt at "inspiration"...

© Cumbria Biodiversity Data Centre

QGIS: Free Dots on Maps

This is a quick rough and ready tutorial aimed at giving a recorder with little or no GIS experience a simple method for creating a basic species distribution map in QGIS like this one:

 © Cumbria Biodiversity Data Centre. Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2011

Blurring and plotting OS Grid References

This is a post about a quick and easy method for turning a list of GB Ordnance Survey grid references into "eastings & northings", so you can plot them on a map. If you want, just skip the details and download my Excel Conversion Utility spreadsheet that can:

• convert your grid references into Eastings and Northings
• tell you the distance of all your records from another grid reference (i.e. a site centroid)
• dumb down your grid reference to 1km, 2km, 10km or 100km resolution.

Making a county base map

Cumbria Relief Map

Since starting work at CBDC I have found one of the most useful layers is a simple raster layer - a relief map of the county giving some of the main geographic features that is useful for putting underneath species distribution maps.

Common Hawker from Virtual Fauna of Lakeland