We had another great year of biological recording in 2025, with 173,873 records being submitted through Ireland’s Citizen Science Portal. This is an increase of more than 20,000 records from the 2024 season, which was also a good year for recording. Records were submitted from 9,607 individual e-mail addresses, which is the largest number of individual records submitting through Ireland’s Citizen Science Portal since 2021, making it the second highest year for number of recorders submitting records. Perhaps unsurprisingly the “Big 3” of our taxonomic groups have retained podium positions again in 2025 with Birds being the most heavily recorded group with 40,067 records, Moths with 39,696 records and Flowering Plants with 34,743 records. Perhaps slightly surprising is that none of these major taxonomic groups are represented in the top three most recorded species.
One of the most interesting features to look at each year is the most recorded species.
In 2025 this was Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes), Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta) and 7-Spot Ladybird (Coccinella septempunctata). In some cases this can be put down to a species having a particularly good season, however in many cases the most heavily recorded species have been the focus of a national project or survey. Red Fox has been widely publicised due to the work of the Urban Fox Survey, which we have partnered with and facilitate the data collection form. The 7-Spot Ladybird has been in focus over the last number of years due to the work of the Ladybird Atlas 2025 project. While species can have good years and bad years, it shows the importance of specific recording initiatives at generating records for common and widespread species.
In 2025 82 recorders submitted over 500 records and from this overall group 43 submitted over 1000 records. The level of time, effort and expertise given by these “Champion Recorders” is truly amazing. This isn’t anything new though and we have noticed very similar numbers of these very active recorders since 2020. For many of these recorders, they are recording all year round and across a number of different taxonomic groups, showing the wide range of skills and interests of this small cohort of recorders. To put one of the figures into perspective, our top recorder last year submitted 5,434 records, and this works out to almost 15 records submitted each day throughout the year. Considering that more than half of all recorders on our site only submit one record for the entire year, this is an amazing achievement and again shows the level of time and expertise that “Citizen Scientist” can contribute.
As always a final reminder that Ireland’s Citizen Science Portal is available to be used by anyone; if you see a species 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 datasets. 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.
A huge thank you to all recorders who submitted data in 2025 through Ireland’s Citizen Science Portal. Your time, effort and expertise which is freely given to collecting this data is greatly appreciated.
