Recording downloads

The latest version of the BLS Spreadsheet (v.7.23, released June 2025) now includes a dropdown list to help with typing in names, and it displays back the ID difficulty score (revised March 2025) in the green columns. Please be careful with the dropdown, it saves a lot of typing time but it is easy to select the wrong option, e.g. Cladonia rangiferina rather than Cladonia rangiformis. 

• The dropdown list only works well in modern versions of Excel. If you have an older version, or are using Numbers, LibreOffice or some other environment, you may need to use the alternative "nodrop" version available below, from which the dropdown function has been removed.

You can still use the old names for things, the spreadsheet converts them for you. Lists of synonyms, current names and BLS numbers, as well as the substrate and scale habitat codes, are included on the coloured tabs for your reference. These lists have been updated to include all the name changes up to June 2025, including the Caloplaca and Xanthoria splits.  

• IMPORTANT: Please do not type anything into the green columns. If it fails to recognize what you have typed in we will sort that out as part of the import process.

It helps us if you can send in a separate spreadsheet for each vice county for which you have records as that is how the database is organized. The spreadsheet will take up to 5,000 record lines so you can use it to accumulate records over a period of time, but we are always happy to receive smaller numbers of records for individual sites or visits as well.

Spreadsheet help

New users of the spreadsheet should work through Part 1 of the presentation from the spreadsheet surgeries first, it could save you a lot of wasted time and effort.  More experienced users might find Part 2, the presentation on how to use PivotTables to analyze records in spreadsheets useful.

All sorts of useful things, including the Identification Difficulties spreadsheet (updated March 2025), summaries of the records held by country and vice county, and a list and map of the churchyards and graveyards in England and Wales for which we hold records. 

Please note that the churchyards spreadsheet includes several lists - a summary by vice county (which has been most thoroughly surveyed?), a summary by location (which churchyards do we have records for?), a summary of each site visit (who, when, and how many species did they find?), and a list of those site visits for which we have additional information on the paper card that is not yet included in the database. This information was last updated in November 2024. 

Sections of the third edition of the Lichens of Great Britain and Ireland (LGBI3) are being made available as they are published as PDFs on our website.

Frank Dobson's Field Keys to Common Churchyard Lichens, Coastal and Seashore Lichens and Lichens on Trees are available as PDFs to download from the Shop page. There are also useful notes on name changes and the species to be expected in the north of Britain.

Useful information to assist with lichen identification and recording, including the Cladonia Key, a Skills List that may be useful to trainers, the Guide to Lichen Surveying and Report Writing (Hill, 2006) and Corrections to the 2nd edition of Lichens of Great Britain & Ireland (LGBI2).

'Corrections' lists simple errors in the 2nd edition of Lichens of Great Britain and Ireland (LGBI2), Smith et al. (2009). The complete table for the Verrucaria table is also available here. The 'Corrections, notes and observations' is a longer document, compiled by Mark Powell. All these were last updated in 2017, and any further corrections or additions should now be sent to Paul Cannon to be taken into account in the development of the 3rd Edition.

Old cards and spreadsheets - these are here just in case they are still needed, but they are no longer used and the species names have not been updated for a long time. All recorders, including those visiting churchyards and woodlands, are asked to use the latest input spreadsheet (above) instead.