Feb 24 - Another Question

I started a chart on the growth of County Records over the years. Recall that a County Record is the first recorded occurrence of a species in a county. This is a singular event. You can't repeat a County Record, they get more difficult as time goes by. The growth in Co Recs would be the basis of this chart - the number of new county records (orange bars, scale on the left) and the cumulative number of County Records (yellow line, scale on the right).

Also added is the unique number of county/species pairs for a year (green line - fortunately this also works with the right scale). The glory years for County records were 1959 and 1960 with 404 and 387 respectively. A second spike was 306 and 308 Co Recs in 2018-19. This seemed nice but maybe not the whole story. We add county/species combinations, but just as interesting is what we don't see.

Taking 1959 as an example, of the 404 Co Recs, 30 have not been repeated, while only 47 were not recorded in the most recent 5 years. That would put an extra 300+ in the recent years. The next plot follows the growth of county/species pairs (blue, left scale) and the number of missing county/species pairs - ones that had been previously recorded, and presumably could be found again (green, left scale).

The story then is the plot of the % void (possible-recorded). This ratio (yellow line, scale on the right) shows that in 2019 we recorded nearly 60% of the known county/species pairs. The average of the last 5 years is over 50%. Maintaining 50+ is more comprehensive than at any time in the last 100 years.

Posted on 24 de fevereiro de 2022, 08:11 PM by jimlem