Submitting records to the Recording Scheme

The HRS collates records from a wide variety of sources but relies heavily on volunteers who submit their observations in a variety of ways:

• Photographs posted to iRecord and iNaturalist (we prefer iRecord).
• Photographs posted on the UK Hoverflies Facebook page and the accompanying data extracted by a team of volunteers after he identity of the animal has been confirmed.
• Records submitted to SyrphBoard – a special platform developed specifically for the HRS by Maploom.
• Spreadsheets emailed directly to the Scheme at syrphid58@gmail.com.

If using a spreadsheet, the minimum information we need is:

• The name of the species you saw,
• The date of the observation,
• Some information about the locality, e.g. a location name and an Ordnance Survey grid reference,
• The recorder's identity.

Species name

Please use the scientific (Latin) names. For the most part, hoverflies do not have generally accepted common names. There have been recent attempts to provide common names (e.g. Bot & van Meutter, 2023¹), but these are not widely known and in the few cases where there are established common names, they are often ambiguous. For example, "drone fly" is a well established common name, but it is used both specifically for Eristalis tenax, but also as a generic term for any vaguely honey-bee like Eristalis species.

If you take photos, you can get help with identification through the UK Hoverflies Facebook page. Sites such as iNaturalist and iSpot may also be able help.

Date of observation

Pretty straightforward! Please use European date format: dd/mm/yyyy, e.g. "23/06/2024".

Locality

A location name that can be found on readily available maps is useful, but the most critical detail is an OSGB grid reference such as "TL123456". The Streetmap web site is very useful in providing access to OS 1:50,000 and 1:25,000 mapping and allowing you to set a marker by clicking on the map and then to view its grid refence. You can also use the GPS capabilities on your phone to get a geographical coordinate and there are various apps available which will show the current grid ref. We can utelise lat/long coordinates, but these require extra work and so are not encouraged. If you are recording hoverflies in your garden, your postcode provides a good alternative since we can look up a grid ref from a postcode quite easily.

Another useful aspect of the locality is the Watsonian Vice County. This is a system using the traditional, pre-1976 counties with the larger counties being divided up into smaller units. They were devised by H.C.Watson in 1852 and have been widely used in biological recording in Britain ever since. Their advantage is that they don't change. By contrast, modern local authority boundaries change all the time and are, therefore, much less useful. You can download a Vice County summary map from the Biological Records Centre and the Botanical Society of the British Isles has a tool on their web-site to lookup the Vice County from a grid reference.

If you know that a site you are visiting is a nature reserve, National Trust property, or something similar, that is useful information and it is worth mentioning. Appending well known abbreviations such as "NNR" or "SSSI" to the location name will do the job, but if it is a wildlife trust reserve it is useful to specify which one. Since "NWT" could mean Norfolk or Northumberland or Northants ... Wildlife Trust - spelling it out a bit more would be useful!

Example: "Castor Hanglands NNR, TF121015, VC32"

Identity of the recorder

A name and contact details, such as an email address, are very useful in case there are any questions about the records. We get many records from various online record submission apps and one of the problems is that the only recorder information we get is an online handle. It is impossible to know who is behind these records and we cannot contact them if there are questions (or acknowledge their contribution in publications!). Hence, our preference for a full name and some form of cantact details.