Grasshoppers and related insects – new atlas and call for records

Grasshoppers and related insects – new atlas and call for records

(Image of Chorthippus parallelus-Meadow Grasshopper courtesy of Paula Lightfoot)

The Orthoptera and Allied Insects recording scheme of Britain and Ireland is working towards a new atlas. This will be the third, after Marshall & Haes’ comprehensive “Grasshoppers and allied Insects of Great Britain and Ireland” published in 1988, and Haes & Harding’s “Atlas of Grasshoppers, Crickets and Allied Insects in Britain and Ireland”, published in 1997.

You can download the latest Scheme newsletter here, for more information, including draft atlas maps.


The scheme is looking for your help in filling some of the gaps in recording and hopes the draft maps begin to illustrate some of the dramatic changes affecting Orthoptera. Despite initial plans to finish in 2012, records will now be collected for two further seasons, 2013 and 2014.

There are many ways of submitting your records as shown below, and the scheme would like to thank everyone who has already contributed to the recording of grasshoppers and crickets – more than 2,500 individual recorders, many Local Biological Record Centres, museums, and the National Biodiversity Data Centre of Ireland

How to submit your observations

Log your observations online at the Orthoptera website or here

If you have a smartphone, this can be a very handy tool for making a record of your observations.
The phone’s GPS position provides an automatic record of the location, you can add a photo, and stored observations
can be uploaded to an online database once you have network coverage.
A dedicated “app” for recording Orthoptera is under development in a collaborative project between the Biological Records Centre and the Universities of York, Southampton and Bristol.
Meanwhile, you can use the “EpiCollect” app using the “Orthoptera” project. See the Scheme newsletter for detailed information on how this works. We have created a project called “Orthoptera”.

If you have records in a digital format like Excel, Recorder, or MapMate, please email them to
orthoptera@ceh.ac.uk or info@biodiversityireland.ie

If you have records on paper recording cards, please send them to one of the following addresses:
Biological Records Centre
Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
Wallingford
OX10 8BB
UK

National Biodiversity Data Centre
Beechfield House
Carriganore WIT West Campus
County Waterford
Ireland

If you are sending your records to your county recorder, there is no need to send them in any other way. Similarly, if you send them centrally to the scheme in any of the above ways, they will be shared with county recorders and Local Record Centres.

Observations of stick insects can also be submitted to the excellent Phasmid Study Group as we exchange data.

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