Sub-series details: CRDA/17/DS/1

The Bats dataset is a summary of bat enquiries received by, or notified to, English Nature which contain information about bats or their roosts.

This sub-series includes data relating to bats in England, Wales and Scotland. It records information arising from enquiries about bats to the conservation agencies. Further information about the British Bats Datasets is provided in the Series Catalogue and Dataset Documentation Catalogues.

Certain fields, which could identify individuals as well as the name of the site at which bats are present, are closed. Exact grid references of sites have been aggregated. The rest of the dataset and related dataset documentation are open.

The language of the materials is .

Dataset documentation consisting of publications relating to the Bat dataset has been transferred to NDAD. Further details are available in the Dataset Documentation Catalogue.

Tony Mitchell-Jones 2003(2), "Focus on bats"; English Nature, 2002, "Bats in roofs - A guide for surveyors"; Countryside Council for Wales 1993, " Bats"; Countryside Council for Wales 1995, "Bats in roofs".

IBM or compatible PC running MS-DOS version 6, Windows version 3.11.

The Bat data system is written in Advanced Revelation (ARev), a Pick-based relational database management system available since 1982. The ARev software was developed by Revelation Software. This company changed its name first to Cosmos and then later to Revelation Technologies (see http://www.revelation.com/). Like Pick itself, Arev is designed for multiple users with multi-valued variable length fields.

The system was originally developed in Prime Information by a Senior Vertebrate Ecologist dealing with bats within English Nature (EN) - to collect biological information that was otherwise under-used. He later converted it to ARev to provide a distributed system, with regional copies held in each of the 15 EN regional offices. The master copy, covering the whole country, was held at the EN HQ in Peterborough. The coverage of the system became less comprehensive from 1991/2 after the re-organisation of English Nature and the break-up of the NCC (Nature Conservancy Council).

English Nature used Easywriter, Advanced Revelation's report generator software, to prepare tabular reports etc on the bat data. Map plotting was done using a program named 'Plot5'; this takes the grid-references and plots their distribution. (Plot5 is a version of the Plot program, developed (possibly in BASIC) by a member of staff in NCC/JNCC, and which was a part of the Recorder software. The Recorder software was developed by JNCC (version 3 in c. 1993) to hold biological data and was made available to Record Centres, individual recorders etc.)

The Bat database was developed as a menu-based system but users also had access to the command line; the Batdata user manual (see the Dataset Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/17/DD/3/1) provides a description of the menu options available to users. Document CRDA/17/DD/4/1 is a screen shot of the entry/edit screen. Data is entered at various regional locations and there is a facility within the system to select all records that have been added or altered since the last time the operation was carried out and copy them to floppy disk for transfer to English Nature headquarters at Peterborough.

Details of the content and transformation validation checks performed by NDAD on the Bat datasets are recorded in the catalogues of individual datasets, see Links to dataset catalogues.

Dataset catalogues provide more detailed information about individual datasets, and are currently available for the following dataset(s):