General biological recording

Historically, records of species' occurrences across the terrestrial and marine environments of some countries have been limited to physical specimens in museums or herbaria. However, a tradition of more comprehensively mapping occurrences across whole countries, not all of which may be supported by specimens, also exists in some areas (e.g. see Preston 2013 and Roy et al. 2014). New technology and websites are increasingly making contributing to these efforts to understand the distribution of biodiversity much easier than it has ever been before, even in the absence of national infrastructure to support national "recording schemes".

For example, for Cyprus, records of species, ideally supported with good photos, can be made using the iNaturalist apps. If the records have photos, and can be identified or confirmed by others, then the records will be approved and shared with the international database of occurrences, GBIF (the Global Biodiversity Information Facility). This means that your records of species will appear on the GBIF maps, and be available for analysis to conservationists and ecologists all around the world. For example, the Cyprus Database of Alien Species, hosted on this website, displays maps of species' distributions from GBIF within its species account pages.

The iNaturalist website also makes it easy to create particular space- and/or time-based project "collections" of data in its system. This can be very convenient for organising recording-focused events such as BioBlitzes or moth nights, and for making it easier for others to discover iNaturalist records for a region or country. For example, the following iNaturalist data collections for Cyprus currently exist:

Biodiversity of Cyprus: This collection covers all of the island except for the UK Sovereign Base Areas (SBA) of Akrotiri and Dhekelia.

The Wildlife of the Akrotiri Peninsula: This collection just covers the Akrotiri SBA.

Wildlife of Dhekelia, Cyprus: This collection just covers the Dhekelia SBA.

For convenience, we have created an "umbrella" project that brings observations within these three collections together, meaning that species records for the whole island of Cyprus are viewable in one place: The Island of Cyprus, an iNaturalist umbrella project

One-off biodiversity recording events

Historic "one-off" events include the Akrotiri Bioblitz of 2019. New occurrences will not appear in this project because it was limited in time as well as space. Although approved data from this event will be shared by iNaturalist with GBIF automatically, additional data not entered through iNaturalist have also been published directly to GBIF. See our general project outputs page under 'Datasets and code', or see the additional data on GBIF directly.

Note also that other recording platforms and apps can, and have been, used on Cyprus, such as observation.org, and typically these records are also ultimately shared with GBIF.