North Kerry Waxcap Survey 2012 - the Northern Ireland Fungus Group

Reference No Recs
Scannell, M.J.P. (1982) Lophium elatum Greville in Ireland. Irish Naturalists' Journal 20: 453 3
Scannell, M.J.P. (1983) Anisogramma virgultorum (Fries.) Thiessen & Sydow new to Ireland.
Irish Naturalists' Journal 21: 139
Scannell, M.J.P. (1987) Lophium mytilinum (Pers. ex Fr.) Fr. (Ascomycetes) in south-east
Galway (H15). Irish Naturalists' Journal 22: 262-263
Scannell, M.J.P. (1994) Asterostroma medium Bres. (Eucomycota: Asterostromataceae) in
Ireland. Irish Naturalists' Journal 24: 415-416
Synnott, D. M. . (1965) Atichia, a fungal genus new to the Irish flora. IN.J. 15, 74 2
Wakefield, E. M. (1962) New and rare British Hymenomycetes (Aphyllophorales). T.B.M.S. 35,
34.
Table 3: References digitised as part of compiling historical records for County Kerry
Cleaning of the Irish Records in the FRDBI
The next important source of fungal records is the FRDBI itself. The FRDBI is a database
containing over 1.6 million records for the British Isles. These records are supplied from a
range of sources including local fungus recording groups, volunteers, the Kew and Edinburgh
herbaria and various other sources. Not every record has a site name, a grid reference or a
county/vice county name as the source may be an herbarium package with minimal
information written on it. Equally, the information in the database maybe incorrect in that there
maybe spelling mistakes in the name, the wrong grid reference given for a site or the wrong
county/vice county given. In 2009, the British Mycological Society looked into cleaning its
datasets and I worked with Paul Kirk, the FRDBI manager, into this process testing some
ideas in Scotland.
As I had been given access to the database for this process, I looked at following the protocols
set out to clean the Irish records. The aim was to give a grid reference to record with site
names only, to allocate all records with a site name and grid reference the correct vice county
using GIS techniques and to fix up spelling mistakes where possible. This was a major
exercise working on 50,754 records. It led to:
• 2,375 records were given a grid reference for the first time
• 288 records were given a new grid reference as the initial one was incorrect for the site
and county given
• 297 records were given a new vice county as they had been allocated the wrong one
• 27 records from Great Britain but labelled as being in Ireland were corrected
The NBN Record Cleaner (http://www.nbn.org.uk/record-cleaner.aspx), GIS and websites
such as http://irish.gridreferencefinder.com/ were all used in this process but it has led to a
much cleaner dataset and brought a significant amount of records into any data analysis. As
the FRDBI is a contributor to the NBDC, this cleaner dataset can be provided to the NBDC and
discussions are being held about this.
Taking the new digitised records, records provided by Tom Harrington and Jenny Seawright
and the cleaner Irish FRDBI dataset into account, this brought the list of known species of
fungi for County Kerry from 887 to 1044 prior to this survey. The species are presented in
Appendix 3 which includes all new species recorded in this survey as well to form an up to date
biodiversity list of fungi for Kerry. This list (also supplied as an Excel file) notes if the species is
found in the vice counties of North Kerry or South Kerry along with the source of the most
record for this species.
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