Some words about the marking scheme

You can read the official guidance on the marking scheme on Blackboard. This is the basic structure:

You can see that you're going to pick up a lot of points merely by getting organised early and doing the things the guidance asks you to do - it's not some subjective number plucked out of the air, so make sure you're following, and it you can get a high mark!

The 30% for 'the collection' means you'll be assessed on the quality and quantity of your specimens. Keep collecting throughout the year and you will get lots to put in - try not to leave everything until the last minute. People often ask how many they should submit, and I've written some thoughts here. Choose specimens that are undamaged and show the critical diagnostic features. Preserve them in a manner appropriate to the group you're collecting.

With 'identification and labelling' you can easily pick up marks just by including all the essential what / where / when / who information. Of course, accuracy of identification is very important! But if you collect a wide variety specimens you may be able to afford leaving out any you're unsure of. It's better to submit fewer specimens which are identified correctly, than loads of which half are wrong.

Presentation and display only offer 10 marks - but if you can be neat and set your specimens out taxonomically, clearly and attractively, it's surely an easy 10 marks? If your handwriting is illegible (or even if it's not) you can print your labels. I've tried to offer some advice about ways to display your specimens in the information about each taxonomic group. You can go down the traditional route or let your imagination roam.

The official guidance sets out in detail what should be in the field diary and the monograph- if you make sure you follow its advice, you will get marks accordingly! As I've said elsewhere, the field diary "only" gets 15% of the marks. But recording things in it diligently will pay dividends when you come to identify and label your specimens.

Just a small word of caution - some of the group-specific guidance on Blackboard is quite 'vintage' so be aware that some identification books recommended may have been superceded... I hope I've given you some more recent ideas on this website though.

'Who' - the final bit of essential information

The author assists a student in identifying some aquatic invertebrates

There aren't that many people out there who have the skills you'll develop while you're doing this assignment. 

And not only that, you'll be producing a record of the species that exist out there right now - and quite probably (because not that many people are doing such a thing), the species you collect and identify might not have been noted from the particular area you took them from before. Possibly ever, and at the least, often not for a long time.

So your records could be really useful - they can feed into a bigger picture about the biodiversity of this country and how it might be changing.

Around Bristol you could send your records to the Bristol Regional Environmental Records Centre (BRERC) - the people there would ensure your data would be sent to specialist recording schemes (see below) and eventually added to the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) Gateway. From there it could be used for all sorts of useful research, even contributing to scientifically supported changes in government policy (yes such things have been known).

If your gathering took place further afield, you can find the appropriate records centre on this list from the National Forum for Biological Recording.

Or, you may prefer to send them directly to one of the many recording schemes for specific groups of organisms: the national Biological Records Centre has a list of them (including certainly niche but perhaps nerdily cool things like slime moulds, ticks and stoneworts). In fact, if you get really into your subject, you'll be able to find much future support from these groups.

Different recording schemes might require your records in slightly different formats - but one thing all of them will want is the What, Where, When and Who.

The Who is you - as it's likely that you will have both collected and identified your specimens. So technically, you should add your name to each of your labels.

Without the who, you've certainly got a taxonomic collection, but you haven't truly produced any biological records with a potentially wider value. However, you may say that your work is supposed to be marked anonymously, and that you don't want (and shouldn't have) your name on it. You certainly won't be marked down for not putting your name on it, and from the point of view of the university, you probably shouldn't put your name on it. There is the dilemma and I leave it with you.

'When' - the third essential thing on your label

Make sure you distinguish your records from those of these US botanists one hundred years ago: write '2015', not just '15' for the year.

 Each specimen you submit should be labelled with the date you collected it.

You want to make this as unambiguous as you can.

In Britain, we usually write the date in the form Day : Month : Year. so 1/4/2015 means the first of April.
 But Americans tend to put Month : Day : Year. 1/4/2015 meaning the fourth of January.

Some people even put the Year first (I know, how crazy can you get): 2015/4/1 - and who knows what on earth that's supposed to indicate.

So to be clear, I suggest you use this format:
the day as a number, the month in words, and the year in full:
1 Apr 2015.

Here's a hypothetical label you might stick in with a snail. Obviously yours would be beautifully neat.

You can see I've got two dates, one for the Col (collected by) date, and one for the Det (determined by) date. The date it was determined (that is, identified) isn't so important, so just gets the year.

You may rightly consider this double-date business overkill, but it is an example of what might happen if a specimen were sent away for a specialist to identify. Or perhaps if a collection were very old and a museum curator was going through it checking the identifications and updating the names.

Noting 'When' is not just about good administration. It can help you (and your marker) identify your species.

Image CC by Chrumps

This year I saw an adult Rose Chafer beetle (Cetonia aurata). The adults are only present in the summer, from May until July. The beetle's lifecycle takes two years though: the rest of the time it exists as a larva feeding underground. Therefore, if I labelled my beetle with a February date, you can be fairly sure I've either misidentified it, or that global warming must be really speeding up now.

Read on for the final element of your labels - the 'who'.

'Where' - how to record locations

Crown copyright and database right 2015. Ordnance Survey (Digimap licence)

You do need to label your specimens with the location you found them. For one thing, it might be very useful in supporting your identification. Some species prefer particular habitats: woodland or coastal sites for example. Some species are very common in the south of England, but disappear towards Scotland. Some might be relatively new to this country and your specimen, as a record of its spread, could be of wider interest.

At a minimum you should include a 6-figure grid reference. This identifies the 100m square in which your specimen lies. This sheet by the Ordnance Survey is a good reminder of how to take a reference from a map.

 But if you want to bypass using your brain, you can use something like Grid Reference Finder which is very easy to use (right click to get the answer plotted on an OS map).

Much, much more fun to a map nerd like myself is the excellent Edina Digimap. 
You can sign up and access it through your university log-in. It allows you to zoom in ridiculously close, and even more excitingly there's a Historic Digimap (which is the nearest thing to time travel available at the moment). You can also waste hours looking at land use and geology. You also can download data for your GIS projects, so I recommend signing up.

You may be in possession of a gps or phone that uses the National Grid, and seemingly it may offer you 8 or even 10 figure grid references. But be wary - 8 figure implies a 10m square and 10 figure a 1m! It's unlikely to be so accurate. Six figures are fine (you can just knock the end ones off from each half of the result, so ST62131 77988 becomes ST621779).

(You might prefer Latitude and Longitude (gridreferencefinder.com also provides these) and you could use these instead of an OS reference if you want. There are various ways to express these co-ordinates - for example in decimal degrees, or as degrees, minutes and seconds. It would be up to you to choose: just be consistent. Decimal degrees seems to be the commonest thing. I do prefer the Ordnance Survey to be honest. But if you're a Google Maps fan, that works with lat/long. )

All those letters and numbers are pretty dry and meaningless on their own, so you should add some sort of description of where you're talking about, i.e. a place name.  You want to use something that would mean something to others, and be reasonably large scale. For example, 'Lockleaze', or 'Wetmoor Wood'.

You might also add a little description of the habitat ('on shingle', perhaps, or 'limestone grassland'). With fungi you might want to note the substrate the species was growing on ('on dead wood', 'on birch tree') and this might also be interesting to include for many invertebrates ('on cow parsley', 'on dung').

Sometimes you might have a standard label which encourages you to fill in other details like altitude - though altitude's a bit too specialist for most collections!

(for a lichen)

You could always devise your own label a bit like this, so all your labels look the same. And it does help you remember to record all the parameters.

(This amateur didn't underline her Latin names. Don't copy her slack habits.)

The herbarium label above includes a VC (Vice County) number. Victorian botanists divided the country into lots of similar-sized areas and they're still used for biological recording. If you were going to submit your records to a national recording scheme (and they'd welcome them), you'd want to include the Vice County. The Herbaria United website has an app for working this out. You don't have to use the VC on your collection though, unless you want to.


Read on for information about the 'when' for your labels.

'What' - the names on your labels

You'll have heard about Linnaeus and his binomial naming system. Today there are internationally agreed rules and regulations about how this system is used (the ICN for plants, and the ICZN for animals). Thankfully you really don't have to worry about all those. But you do want to make sure that you write your specimen names in an accepted style.

Here are some bluebells:

Image by Pluralzed (CC)

They're Hyacinthoides non-scripta. The first word (the genus or generic name) gets a capital letter. The second word (the specific name or epithet) always starts in lower case.

If you're typing your labels, you use italics, or you can underline the name. If you're writing the labels by hand, it's easiest to underline.

Names can change over time as taxonomists refine their understanding of how different species are related. So you should really check you've got the currently accepted name, especially if the book you're using to identify them is a bit old. 
 You can do this very easily on the Natural History Museum's UK Species Inventory.

Back in the dark ages I learnt that bluebells were Endymion non-scriptus. If you search for this on the Inventory, it will show you this is passe and no longer recommended, and helpfully gives you the new title too. (Annoyingly, I can't seem to unlearn the old one).

After the Latin name you'll see the authority - the person or people who named the species. There are complicated rules about how this works (you can look them up in the links at the top of the page), which is why our bluebell's authority looks so complicated. But many species will just have an L. or Linnaeus (depending if they're flora or fauna... so many rules). Whilst it is not absolutely essential, you are sure to impress your markers if you include the authority.

 So you would label your hypothetical bluebell thus:
Hyacinthoides non-scripta  (L.) Chouard ex Rothm.

If you're dealing with animals not plants, there is an extra element to include: the date when the name was published.

CC image by Trevor Harris

This lovely stag beetle is called 

 Lucanus cervus (Linnaeus, 1758).

Again, the NHM's UK Species Inventory  will give you the correct details; just copy them as you see them (including any brackets).

Yet another thing that the Species Inventory will help you do, is to arrange your specimens: you will of course want to do this taxonomically, it being a taxonomic collection. If you look in the top right corner of the species' page, you will see how it fits into the overall hierarchy. If you are collecting beetles, they will all be in the same Order (Coleoptera), so you will probably want to arrange them by Family. In this case you might want to note their family on your label. If you're collecting flowers from the Asteraceae, they're already in the same family, so you might want to note their subfamilies and organise them that way.

  Finally, you don't have to, but you may want to add an English common name to your label. With some species, we all agree on what they signify by common usage (who doesn't recognise a bluebell? though in Scotland a bluebell can refer to what is known elsewhere in Britain as a harebell). It's best to use the common names given in a book... a member of the public might call any yellow dandelion-ish plant a dandelion, but you'll know better.

Of course, lots of species - particularly the cruelly overlooked ones like mosses, lichens, beetles and earthworms, to name just a few - don't have common names (other than Moss, Lichen, Beetle and Worm). Sometimes lists of official common names have been tortuously invented. In short, if there are common names, feel free to include them. But if they don't exist or you don't like them, don't worry, leave them out.

This is your taxonomic collection, and common names don't always reflect accurately the underlying biological relationships between species. In fact sometimes they can be downright misleading (consider the starfish). They are 'folk taxonomies' and a very interesting subject in their own right (there's an interesting anthropological article here). Common names often reflect a species' cultural significance as well as its habitat, form or colour - but that's a different course entirely and I digress...

Read on for information about the 'where' for your labels.