Will my records be checked (verified)?

Your Garden Butterfly Survey records are shared with County Butterfly Recorders (CBRs) and their assistants, who are registered as iRecord 'verifiers'. These expert volunteers check your records, using their local and ecological knowledge. CBRs add verified records into local databases. Butterfly Conservation relies on these verified data to make sure the National Scheme database is robust for science and conservation. 

When your records are checked directly in iRecord, you may receive emailed feedback from your local CBR. You may also receive automated email messages from iRecord about the status of your records. Some CBRs may verify records outside of iRecord.

We relaunched Garden Butterfly Survey with a fresh system in 2022 that connects to iRecord, to make regular sharing of records with verifiers more straightforward. In September 2022, we switched on the data flow to iRecord verifiers. Records are also now publicly visible to other iRecord users. We delayed this switch while we arranged historic records access for recorders.

Recorders who asked for a copy of their past records can now see these in their Garden Butterfly accounts. But note that this historic dataset is not provided to County Recorders via iRecord, as the records have already been shared.

Please note that the public visibility of Garden Butterfly records is set to 1Km in iRecord, but verifiers have enhanced access to view and download records at the level of detail originally entered ("capture resolution") in accordance with the Ts & Cs and privacy notice on the site.