2025 has been a particularly good year for biological recording, with numbers up across each month (except February) when compared with the figure from 2024.
The 100,000th record this year was submitted on the 10th of July, which is earlier than this milestone during the 2023 or 2024 seasons. We got in contact with the recorder Paul M Walsh to find out why he records:
My submission of the 100,000th record through Ireland’s Citizen Science Portal for 2025 which was a Small Tortoiseshell butterfly and recorded in Ballyvaughan, Co Clare on 10th July was clearly a fluke but being in the Burren in mid-summer may have helped!
Diurnal insects were less cooperative than on some previous trips there, and butterflies on 10th July were overshadowed by my first ever Burren Green moth that night (10th/11th). But I’m a great believer in ‘submit everything’, and managed 470 records of 280 animal/plant species in Clare that week (stats courtesy of the NBDC website’s user-friendly query system). Remember you can check your own recording stats through the “View My Records” function here: View My Records
I find ‘dots on maps’ biological recording more rewarding than probably any other fieldwork approach, dating from early contributions to An Foras Forbartha and especially BirdWatch Ireland / British Trust for Ornithology atlas projects from the late 1970s / early 1980s onwards. This intensified from the mid-2000s when I was heavily focused on MothsIreland recording and bird atlassing, around the same time as NBDC’s establishment. Fast-forward to Covid lockdowns in 2020 and collecting records for NBDC submission provided a welcome distraction, now with an added focus on hoverflies, bees and other groups.
The map below summarises the 10-km square distribution of roughly 18,000 records I’ve so far submitted for 2016-2025 (90% for 2020-2025) – clearly I need to stray beyond Munster a bit more…
Surveys and Records Officer Oisín Duffy had this to say about the 100,000th record:
The 100,000th record mark has become a relatively reliable feature of the month of July, having been submitted during that month for now four years in a row. At the time of publishing (01/10/2025) we have received 148,477 records through our recording portal.
It’s great to see the level of interest and engagement within the recording network and as always, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of our citizen science recorder network for submitting their records this year.
Ireland’s Citizen Science portal is available to be used by anyone; if you see a species of note and are sure of its identification, please submit the details to https://records.biodiversityireland.ie/ so that the observation can be added to our national biodiversity database. This will allow us to continue to build the knowledge base on what species we have in Ireland and help us to better understand how they are distributed.
