2020 County Report for South Lancashire

David Earl

Although field excursions were cancelled botanical observations continued particularly via the iNaturalist website with a Greater Lancashire https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/greater-lancashire project kindly beigin created by SJ McWilliam for which we had over 60,000 plant observations, 2100 species, 1681 observers and 1072 identifiers for 2020. In addition to records from iNaturalist we continue to receive a significant number of plant records from iRecord, emails and spreadsheets. 2020 records entered thus far to Mapmate are 25,059, 1225 species  for VC59 and 7,648, 981 species for VC60.

 

There is still a considerable backlog of 2020 records to process especially coastal records from VC60 and we are still awaiting records from the other LERCs within VC59 which may include around 30,000+ records from iNaturalist, iRecord, local recorders and consultants.

 

The South Lancashire Flora Committee decided that vascular plant sections of the flora are to be released as a series of downloadable pdfs via the North Western Naturalists Union website and it is hoped that the initial sections covering Clubmosses, Horsetails and Ferns will be available before March 2021. In the meantime the vascular species accounts are being regularly reviewed and extended with the addition of images and updated maps. The provision of the species accounts via downloadable pdfs gives us the flexibility to make and provide updates and we have already had some exciting finds during January 2021.