North Kerry Waxcap Survey 2012 - the Northern Ireland Fungus Group

Digitisation of published records
A significant number of records for County Kerry however were published but not available in
any recording database. The various volumes of the Catalogue of Irish Fungi by Muskett and
Malone published between 1976 and 1984 list all publications of fungi from before these dates
with Mangan’s paper filling in the gaps up until 2000 (Mangan, 2008). All the publications
containing records for County Kerry that I could obtain were read and records extracted from
them and digitised. The aim was to produce a more complete list of fungi recorded for County
Kerry which is hopefully useful for biodiversity strategies for the county.
The Muskett and Malone catalogues do not give details of individual records but list all species
recorded in Ireland along with a number relating to the published reference. In total, they list 31
references containing records that were made in County Kerry but I additionally digitised some
other papers that I came across (see Table 3). The sources are mainly in the Irish Naturalist’s
Journal, its predecessor, the Irish Naturalist and the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy.
Such journals are not easy to access and under the auspices of this grant, I was granted
access to the JSTOR Irish collection. JSTOR (www.jstor.org) offers free access to digital
copies of academic papers for research purposes and in 2006, worked with Queen’s
University Belfast to digitise the complete back catalogue of 75 journals about the natural
history and heritage of Ireland. These include the journals quoted above. I am deeply indebted
to JSTOR for granting me access to the Irish Collection as it made the next stage of this
project possible making these journals immediately accessible.
Some additional papers were obtained from the British Mycological Society library and thanks
go to Gill Butterfield for help.
Most biological recording databases are set up for rapid data entry of species lists found by the
observer, i.e. one site / multiple species. Published records however often tend to be
presented the other way round with species listed one by one along with details of the sites at
which they are found listed, i.e. one species / multiple sites. This means direct entry into most
biological recording databases is tedious and time consuming. To solve this, for digitising data
for the West Galway survey, I wrote a simple database that simplified this process. As shown
in the screenshot below, the form allows for the selection of a species at the top and below this,
a number of sites can be entered for that species. This is saved in a table that fits straight into
the Recorder 6 import wizard making the records compatible with the NBDC data handling
system. As a new site is entered, the database remembers this and it is offered in dropdowns
to speed up future data entry. For this project, this database was extended streamlining its
working and adding new attributes to the recording form. In this way 679 records from a total of
42 references were digitised and migrated into Recorder 6. Data entry was not restricted to
just those records within Kerry but all records in that paper were digitised. This database
speeded up data entry significantly but it remained a time consuming exercise.
Fig 1: Published records data entry form
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