2022 County Report for Kincardineshire
David Elston & David Welch
Filling gaps in records
A particular focus continues to be to visit and produce species lists for poorly recorded tetrads, in some cases requiring visits to tetrads with no previous botanical records in the BSBI Distribution Database (DDb). In total 51 such tetrads have been recorded in 2022 leaving 38 priority tetrads to be recorded in including 9 with fewer than 10 taxa in the DDb.
Rare Plant Register (RPR)
Work has continued on summarising records and producing accompanying text for a RPR for Kincardineshire. Some 450 taxa will be included, and the production of maps and insertion into neatly laid-out tables is being performed using a script in the statistical package R. It is hoped that a full version of the RPR will be ready for release in 2023.
Outreach
1) A guided walk was given for the Scottish Wildlife Trust Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire Local Group at St Cyrus NNR on 4th June.
2) A talk entitled “Discovering Wild Plants In And Around Aberdeen” was given both to the Bridge of Don Community Discussion Group (13th October) and to the Scottish Wildlife Trust Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire Local Group (20th October). This talk drew heavily on records from Kincardineshire.
Urban Flora
An Urban Flora recording weekend was organised jointly with Botanical Society of Scotland (main photo by Chris Jeffree) from Friday 8th - Monday 11th July. In total, the 17 people involved collected about 3300 records involving 426 taxa across 8 different settlements, 4 of which gave records for Kincardineshire.