Ireland’s Citizen Science Portal – Recording Summary 2023
We had another great year of recording activity with 163,502 records submitted through Ireland’s Citizen Science Portal in 2023.
Records were received from 8033 individual recorders across all 32 counties. An interesting trend with data submitted through the Citizen Science Portal is that more than half of recorders only submit one record during a calendar year. In contrast to this we had 38 recorders who submitted over 1000 records, nine of which submitted over 2000 records.
Recording Activity from 2017 – 2023 – Showing the percentage of recorders and the number of recorders submitted.
Interestingly, the small but very dedicated recorders submitting over 1,000 records in a season usually ends up as less than ½ a percent. However, this small number of recorders in 2023 are responsible for approximately 45% of all records submitted.
Overall, the number of records submitted through Ireland’s Citizen Science Portal is down on previous years and we appear to be entering into a plateau after a few bumper years of recording which were noticed during and after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Total number of records submitted through Ireland’s Citizen Science Portal 2012 – 2023.
Recorder numbers have risen in 2023 compared to 2022 and are the second highest recorder numbers we have, only behind 2021 which had 9000+ recorders.
Total number of individual recorders who submitted records through Ireland’s Citizen Science Portal 2012 – 2023.
Perhaps unsurprisingly the most commonly recorded taxonomic groups remains unchanged for another year. Flowering plants were the most heavily recorded taxonomic group in 2023 with over 38,000 records submitted and making up 23% of all records. Birds were second with over 36,000 records and Moths being the third most recorded group with over 31,000 records. Butterflies and Terrestrial Mammals make up the fourth and fifth most recorded groups with over 14,000 and 7,000 records respectively. More than ¾ of all records submitted through Ireland’s Citizen Science Portal in 2023 belong to one of the above taxonomic groups.
An interesting note is that even though the Flowering Plants group was the most heavily recorded in 2023, no species from that group found their way into the Top 10 most recorded species, which are listed below:
Butterfly species, make up half of the most recorded species in 2023. Some of these butterfly species are common visitors to the garden habitats. If you’d like to find out more about or Garden Butterfly Monitoring Scheme, you can do that here: https://biodiversityireland.ie/surveys/garden-butterfly-monitoring-scheme/. Species such as Hedgehog and Otter are both currently being recorded as part of national surveys by partner organisations, more on details on those projects can be found here, Irish Hedgehog Survey (https://biodiversityireland.ie/surveys/irish-hedgehog-survey/) and National Otter Survey (https://biodiversityireland.ie/surveys/national-otter-survey/). 7-Spot Ladybird is also our most heavily recorded Ladybird species, accounting for more than half of all Ladybird records in our Ladybirds of Ireland dataset. To find out more about this species or any of our Ladybird species, then please check out our Ladybird Atlas 2025 project: https://biodiversityireland.ie/surveys/ladybird-atlas-2025/
Remember 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.
A massive thank you to all recorders who submitted data in 2023, there is a huge amount of time, effort and expertise which goes in to collecting this data and we are greatly appreciative that these records are submitted through Ireland’s Citizen Science Portal.
