Spreadsheet of "Conservation Designations for UK Taxa"

JNCC has attempted to collate all the current lists into one place and make this available to users as a downloadable spreadsheet .

 

File name: Taxon_designations_20080414.zip (2.2 mb)

 

NB: the date last updated is included in the file title (eg 20050830 = 30/8/2005 and  the file is zipped to facilitate downloading. See details of the updating process to discover how this spreadsheet differs from previous versions.

 

If you are not able to download or decompress  ZIP archives successfully you may wish to download the uncompressed version of the conservation designations for UK taxa, but note this file is very large (15 mb)  and will take approximately 35 minutes to download on a 56 kbps modem.

 

The spreadsheet can be searched to find which designations a particular species has, or to find out which UK species are listed for a given designation.  For a full explanation of what the spreadsheet contains and how best to use it please look at the spreadsheet guidance.

 

The spreadsheet contains several worksheets – the most important being the "Master list"

 

At a broad level the Master list comprises three categories of lists:

In effect the Master list is really a collation of different lists combined into the same data structure, with each row being distinguished by a unique combination of "Taxa" and designation. The collection of lists is referred to as the "species designations" collation.

 

The term "designation" refers to any 'badge' given to a species whether or not it has a legal standing.  A taxa with 10 designations will be represented by ten rows on the master list. Note that the generic term "taxa" is in this context a more strictly accurate term than "species" because some of the listed entities are ranked as being either above or below the "species" level.

This spreadsheet is a first attempt to collate all this information into a readily useable form.  More designations and species will be added to the list as work continues.