Links for Oxfordshire recorders' day

[These links were originally compiled for a workshop in Oxfordshire in Feb 2012, 
but may be of interest more widely.]

These are links to the various sites looked at during the online resources workshop at the Oxfordshire recorders' day, organised by TVERC on 25 February 2012. Quite a few of these have appeared in the blog before (e.g. citizen science, online identification), but they're all useful sites so no harm in repeating them.

Photos for identifying wildlife
Following discussion of the pros and cons of using digital photos for wildlife identification we spent some time exploring iSpot (you will be unsurprised to hear!), and what the site does to encourage proper documentation of photo-records and their identification. We also looked in on the iSpot identification keys.

Online recording
Next up was online recording, focusing on Indicia and Birdtrack. Like iSpot, Indicia is one of the projects from OPAL, and it provides a toolkit for adding online recording to an existing website. There are an increasing number of effective recording systems being set up with Indicia, including for the British Dragonfly Society and the BBC's version of the UK Ladybird Survey.

Birdtrack has been around for a while now, developed by the British Trust for Ornithology and partners, and it really is a superb way of making bird records useful both to you as recorder, and to the conservation organisations that can make use of your data. I've only recently started adding my bird records to the site (I'm not much of a birder, so it's not been a great loss to them!), and am really impressed with the way that Birdtrack handles a range of different types of recording, and provides excellent feedback.

Twitter, Facebook, Google+, blogs: time well-spent, or time, well, just spent?
We looked at just a few examples here including:

The Square Metre at TQ 78286 18846

• Mark Avery's genius for stimulating debate and making us think about conservation, farming and more
• Hagbourne Wildlife, a good example of a local area-based wildlife blog
• The Square Metre at TQ 78286 18846, my favourite biological recording blog ever
• Botanical Society of the British Isles on Facebook - a good example of how this should be done, regular updates, informative and entertaining

As for Twitter, just leap in and have a go. I'm @kitenet if you want to follow me. I haven't found how to make the most of Google+ yet, but I'm on there too.

Other resources

Finally, a mixed bag of other stuff:

• lots of mapping links on my Kitenet website - grid refs, gazetteers, GIS and other gadgets
• Nature Societies Online at the Natural History Museum - you'll be amazed how many wildlife-related groups there are in your county
• Biodiversity Heritage Library - great library of mostly older natural history and biodiversity science publications, mostly quite old, not only available as good quality scans but also searchable
• Instant Wild, a well-designed and fun citizen science project that asks you to identify mammals caught on camera from around the world - addictive and useful