National Atlas update

A big thanks to everyone who found the time to do the timed tetrad visits. We now have very close to 100% of all visits completed - a great effort.

Dawn Balmer, BTO National Atlas organiser has issued the following statement on the Atlas Regional Coordinators Forum concerning submission of March and other outside winter/breeding season records to the Atlas.

"Any record submitted online automatically goes into the database and will be available for your local atlas.

We took the decision to only show square summaries for the winter recording period (Nov-Feb) and breeding season (Apr-Jul). All records are sat in tables on the database but not selected to display for these seasons. For the national atlas we may use some of the breeding evidence records to confirm breeding in a 10km square, especially for the scarcer species that may be difficult to prove breeding in the next few months eg Crossbill, Goshawk, owls etc.

Anyone entering records for March will be able to see their own records online in 'View/edit my records'. The number of Roving Records submitted outside the main recording periods are shown in brackets, and if you click on the number you'll get a table listing Roving Records by month for March, August, September and October. All these will be available for validation too. March is a difficult month with some breeding evidence going on, but come the end of the summer/autumn we really want to keep the records for August-October separate from the breeding season/winter when there is a lot of passage going on".

So, if you get any March breeding evidence, feel free to input these as roving records, ideally at tetrad level.