Recording downloads

The latest version of the BLS Spreadsheet (v.7.20, released January 2025) now includes a dropdown list to help with typing in names and displays back the ID difficulty score 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. 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 on the coloured tabs for your reference.

Please note that spreadsheet currently uses the taxon dictionary as it was in November 2024, but the recent names for the Teloschistales can be used if you wish. For now it converts them back to the more familiar names but that is a temporary measure, the synonyms will be updated as soon as the database has caught up with the changes. 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, and also separate out any churchyard records, as that is how the database is organised. The spreadsheet will take up to 5,000 record lines so you can use it to accumulate records for the VC over a period of time if you wish, but we are always happy to receive smaller numbers of records for individual sites as well.

This spreadsheet is designed to be used in modern versions of Excel and so is in .xlsx format, but it should also work in OpenOffice or under windows emulation.

The Guidelines document includes help on using the spreadsheet and our substrate and scale habitat codes, and the handout from the training session run at Cober Hill in March 2019 may also be useful. Both are a bit out of date but we will be updating them, and recording short video tutorials as well, in the next few months.

All sorts of useful things, including the Identification Difficulties spreadsheet (updated to use modern names), 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.

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.