Introduction

The map below (loading slowly as you read) is Suffolk overprinted to show the density of records achieved for 5-year period 2005 to 2009. We achieved excellent cover overall, with 91% of tetrads visited, and with an average of 13.1 species recorded per square and a highest count of 31 species. Butterfly Conservation’s Millennium plus 10 mapping will be published as “The State of Britain’s Butterflies 2010” using our data, although the maps will be presented in 10km squares. At this scale, Suffolk’s average cover will rise to 26 species/square.

On the map below, the clear areas show squares that were not visited at all, and those coloured yellow are under-recorded (in many places just a single Painted Lady or Brimstone having been submitted). The majority of the unvisited & under-recorded squares lie in agricultural High Suffolk, falling between Eye and Beccles.

We start the 2010 season with a blank canvas in many ways, but we can use the black hole map to identify squares without a regular recorder, and therefore worthy of special attention in future.

First find your home square, and identify the closest “black holes”. When the map has loaded completely, you will be able to zoom in to see the O.S. map in more detail. Be patient whilst it comes live. Then you can make your plans for the next 5-year period. The best survey results are achieved with 3 visits – one in spring, another in July, and one in late summer.

Help for using the map

When you first load the page it may take a few moments for the map to appear below. The map can be zoomed and moved using the controls on the left side of the map. Double-clicking on a point on the map will zoom in one level centred on that point. The map can also moved by clicking and dragging the mouse on a particular point of the map.

Near the top-right corner of the map is a '+' icon that when clicked opens up a pop-box for turning the various map features off and on. For example, you may find it useful once you have identified a poorly recorded tetrad to turn off the Coverage coloured squares so that you can see more clearly the map underneath.

The map works reasonably quickly in most browsers apart from Internet Explorer - try Mozilla Firefox, Opera or Google Chrome browsers as speedier alternatives. Most actions will take some seconds to respond in Internet Explorer.