Atlases of the flora and fauna of Great Britain and Ireland
Open-knowledge reference entry
The biodiversity of Great Britain and Ireland is one of the most well-studied geographical areas of its size in the world. This biota work has resulted in the publication of distribution atlases for many taxonomic groups. This page lists these publications.
A full atlas is generally regarded as a definitive work on distribution, whereas a provisional atlas is typically produced as an interim stage to show survey progress.
One of the bodies responsible for publishing a great number of distribution atlases is the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology. Each atlas presents 10 km2 distribution maps for the species within its scope. Maps typically use different symbols to signify records from differing time-periods - solid symbols for 10-km squares (hectads) that have recent records, and unfilled symbols for 10-km squares for which only older records exist, according to a defined cut-off date.
The atlases are produced by the Biological Records Centre (BRC), which is run by the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, part of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology based at CEH Wallingford, Crowmarsh Gifford, Oxfordshire. The data used to produce the maps is gathered by volunteer biological recorders and collated by the BRC Recording Schemes.
The atlases fall into two groups:
Main Atlases are commercially published books, presenting the current state of knowledge for well-recorded groups.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4816871. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Atlases of the flora and fauna of Great Britain and Ireland” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.