Life and Year lists in the iOS App
22 Mar 2016
The new version of the iOS App initially contained some differences in the Life and Year List totals, compared to those shown in 'Explore My Records' on the website.
This discrepancy was caused by two issues. Firstly, the way subspecies are handled across different baselists. For example, Green-winged Teal is split by some taxonomic authorities but lumped with Teal in others. This was resolved behind the scenes, so subsequent updates now show the correct totals.
The second issue is free-flying escapes. In the old system, any species that has been deemed to occur in a wild state by BOURC (e.g. Red-breasted Goose, Bufflehead) is considered 'countable' in BirdTrack. However, there was no way to deal with known or presumed escapes, such as the Hooded Merganser at Radipole Lake in Dorset.
Known escapes can now be flagged as such via the optional details when adding records via the online system. The same functionality will be added in Phase 2 of the App development, due later in 2016. This will allow us to exclude known escapes from users' lists in future. However, free-flying / 'wild-state' species that BOURC only deem to occur in a British context as Category E (e.g. Ruddy Shelduck) present a different problem. We previously had a field in our species table to deal with this. However, in globalising the system, this approach no longer works because there are different baselists (some with more than 10,000 species on them) and also because one country's 'not-countable' species will be another's Category A equivalent. Please bear with us as we seek to resolve this tricky issue.
Share this page