Cheshire Gazetteer Development:

The Cheshire region, as within any County, Vice-County or other form of major biological recording area/boundary, has lots of places which are recorded for their biological organisms. Most of these recorded areas currently comprise statutory wildlife sites (e.g. SSSIs), non-statutory wildlife sites (e.g. SBIs and SINCs) and people’s back-gardens. Other sites tend to be places with public access (e.g. commons, parks, Local Authority owned open space, etc.). The question is "How are names applied to this plenitude of differing sites by naturalists and ecologists when they are out recording and/or surveying ?".

Due to the fact that many naturalists have used disparate software for storing their records there has been a tendency for each individual recorder to apply their own ideas of names and OS Grid References to the places that they visit (e.g. Delamere Forest, "Delamear Forest", "Delemere Forest", etc.). This confusion means that there is, potentially, an enormous amount of work to be undertaken to ensure that all of the records associated with sites, with differing names for the same site, are actually combined.

If the situation of multiple names for the same site continues it means that this ’extra’ work must be undertaken every time people send data to the Local Record Centre - a vast onus which eats into available resources. What can we do to reduce this unnecessary overload?

It would be far better if every recorder worked with the same sites file so that records could be apportioned to sites which everyone understood. RECORD wishes, as an early project, to develop a Gazetteer of sites within the Cheshire region to help reduce this potential confusion and to be able to pass this standard site/location file to other software users so that they can have access to it on their own recording systems. This will be relatively simple for those using Recorder-2000/2002/6 though there are currently a few problems to be resolved with getting the file into the other standard recording packages - discussions with the author’s of these packages are currently ongoing.

How will we do it ?

The first stage of this project will be to obtain OS maps for the whole of our remit area of the Cheshire region. These maps will then form the underlying basis for splitting the region down into land parcels (e.g. Boroughs and Parishes) within which will be drawn boundaries for known sites, followed by habitat areas (e.g. woodlands, water-bodies, etc.) which have not been recorded. Following this task, the remaining land areas will be broken down into logical compartments and named (where possible from names available on current OS Landranger maps (e.g. from nearby features such as farms, towns, churches, etc.)).

Each of these land areas will then be assigned a central OS Grid Reference. This should then enable us to enter any incoming record onto the database and to plot that record on a distribution map.

Please Note: We will always be interested in hearing about new sites and recording areas and these will be added to an evolving map set for the Cheshire region. Also, an original grid reference provided by the recorder for a record will always over-ride the central grid reference for the site when entering the data into RECORD’s database. This is due to the fact that we would prefer to provide as accurate a grid reference for each record entered as possible to enable micro-habitat niches to be identified and to provide accurate data for re-visits by researchers in the future. Where a provided grid reference is obviously incorrect then we will contact the original recorder in order to rectify the situation or, where this is impossible, the central/centroid grid reference will be applied.

The next stage will be to ensure that each of these identified sites and land parcels is entered into Recorder-2000/2002/6 as a hierarchical site structure. Once completed, or at specified area completions, this sites file can be exported to other satellite Recorder users. Paper copies can be made available to non-Recorder users and it is hoped to put a copy up on the InterNet on this web-site.

How can you help ?

In order to be able to capture all the differing names for sites and to be able to apply these names as synonyms for a particular land area we need to know what sites you have on your own site lists (i.e. what sites you record, what you call the sites, and the OS Grid References for each). Please, if you have a site list of your own, or a society or club site list, could you send a copy to us, either on e-mail via: [email protected] , or by post to: RECORD, Oakfield House, Chester Zoological Gardens, Upton, Chester, Cheshire, CH2 1LH.

Many thanks for your help with this project.

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