From British Arachnological Society

Objectives

The British Arachnological Society collaborated with the Biological Records Centre to develop a revised Spider Recording Scheme which was launched in April 1987, at the time of the Annual General Meeting of the British Arachnological Society. This replaced a scheme that was started in 1964 but which had fallen into abeyance.

The new scheme has the following objectives:

To define the geographical distribution of each species of spider found in the British Isles.
To record the arachnofauna of selected sites of particular concern to nature conservation, and other areas whose habitat potential might be threatened.
To provide opportunities to extend out knowledge of the biology of spiders, with special consideration of their habitats, seasonal occurrence and population dynamics.

Phase Two

The Spider Recording Scheme hasn't finished with the publication of the Atlas. Now is the time to concentrate on more detailed scientific work, studying the ecology of spiders and locating 'hot-spots', amongst other projects. To this end guidelines on future work together with the new version of the recording cards are available here for download:

Phase 2 Guidelines
The New RA65 Recording Card
- Front
- Back
A Site-based recording card
- As a zipped Excel spreadsheet
- As an Adobe PDF

MapMate is a popular biological recording and mapping software package which is now fully compliant with our phase 2 data requirements.

Record cards should be sent to either the County/Area Organiser or direct to the National Organiser, the address is listed in contacts. Computerised records are also acceptable, but they must adhere to a precise layout as described in a paper by Stan Dobson.

Updated Maps

The deadline for records included in the provisional atlas was the end of 2000. The BAS Council agreed that after 5 years it would be worth updating the maps, and a deadline of the end of 2005 was set for the receipt of new records. The following file (18Mb) makes available the results of these new data:

Updated BAS/SRS Distribution Maps
This download has had to be disabled because of problems with the Adobe Acrobat file - All the maps are now available individually from the Checklist
Index to the above maps compiled by Ian Dawson (this is only relevant to those of you who managed to successfully download the PDFs)

The Newsletter

The SRS also publishes a Newsletter three times a year, which is distributed to BAS and SRS members, the most recent editions are now available on-line.

Archive of Newsletters

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