Send a sighting with iRecord
iRecord and iNaturalist accept records of any UK species and pass them to the national scheme for that group.
Send a sighting to iRecord →Take part in wildlife recording
When you send in a sighting, it can become part of the national record. Which scheme you send it to depends on what you saw.
Recording schemes and what they do
A wildlife record is only useful once it reaches a body that keeps it, checks it and puts it to work. Behind the counting apps and the paper record cards sit a small number of organisations that actually hold the UK's species data, and each one covers a different slice of the wildlife you might see.
Who holds the records
Some schemes cover a single group in detail: bird surveys run through the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), plant records through the Botanical Society's recording network, butterfly transects through Butterfly Conservation. Others take almost anything, from any group, and route it onward: iRecord and iNaturalist both accept general sightings and pass verified records to the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) Atlas and the relevant national scheme. Marine sightings have their own recording schemes again, separate from the schemes built around land-based groups.
What happens after you submit
A record does not go straight onto a map. It is usually checked by a verifier with expertise in that group, who confirms the identification or asks for more detail such as a photograph or a grid reference. Once verified, it joins the scheme's dataset and, from there, feeds into the national trends, distribution maps and status assessments.
Choosing the right scheme
Sending a record to the scheme that actually specialises in that group means it reaches someone qualified to check it. It also means the record can be found again: by the next survey of that species, by a local records centre, or by a conservation body deciding where to act.
The scheme you need depends on what you have seen and how much time you want to give it, from a single photograph on an app to a repeated transect walked through a season. See Identification Help if you are not yet sure what you are looking at, or UK Species to check what is already known about it.
Recording routes for every group
Every wildlife group has an established recording route, run by a national organisation, that takes your sightings and adds them to the record used to track that species.
Join a BTO bird survey
British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) surveys range from a one-off garden count to a season of repeat visits along a fixed route.
See BTO surveys →Record plants, butterflies and marine life
The Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland, Butterfly Conservation and marine recording schemes each run networks suited to their own group.
Find your species group →The recording year
The wildlife recording calendar follows biology. A survey asks for records in the window when a species can actually be found and identified: birds in song, insects on the wing, plants in flower, amphibians in the pond. Because each of these windows falls at a different point in the year, there is usually something running somewhere.
Spring
Spring is when summer migrant birds return and species begin breeding, so most national bird surveys open for the season and ask recorders to make repeat visits to a fixed site or square. Amphibian spawn counts and the first flowering records of the year also fall in this window.
Summer
Summer covers the flight period for most UK butterflies and many other insects, and the flowering season for most plants, so transect walks and plant monitoring surveys run through these months. It is also when most BioBlitzes take place: an intensive survey of every species found at one site over a set period, usually a day or a weekend, organised by a local wildlife trust, museum or record centre and open to anyone who turns up.
Autumn and winter
Recording continues once the growing season ends. Autumn brings fungi surveys and the return passage of migrating birds, while winter is the season for garden bird counts and for waterbird counts on estuaries, reservoirs and other wetlands, when overwintering numbers are at their highest and easiest to count.
Which of these fits a particular interest, or a particular week, depends on the species group involved. The UK species groups page lists what is being recorded in each group, and the protected sites and places page shows where local surveys and BioBlitzes tend to be based.
Where your sightings go
A photograph and a location, logged through the right scheme, join records that recorders, statutory bodies and researchers already draw on.