West Midland Bird Club

Privately published: £10.00
2008 (no ISBN)

A monumental amount of work has gone into producing this digital atlas, covering the Vice County of Warwickshire (VC38) for which the authors and field-workers are to be greatly commended. It replaces the printed Atlas of Warwickshire Beetles (2001) by the same authors. 

Over 70,000 sightings are summarised in more than 2,100 species accounts, each (apart from a small handful of poorly-recorded species or families) with a map showing sightings by era (pre 1900, 1900–1979, 1980–2000 and 2001–2007) on 2×2km square tetrads, For over 1,150 species, there is an accompanying photograph — though the authors are at pains to point out that this is not a field guide, and many species cannot be identified without dissection. The accounts are detailed, well-written and informative, although a glossary would have been appreciated — not least by lay coleopterists like your reviewer — to explain jargon terms like "synanthropic" (meaning "ecologically associated with humans"). The frequent references to specimens in Birmingham Museum  serve to highlight the awfulness of the fact that those collections are no longer available to either researchers or the public.

Charts show distribution by month and relative abundance of species within a family, as appropriate. Full taxonomic citations are given. Navigation is straightforward, with a list of families and a facility for searching by common name. Species can be found using obsolete synonyms, but there is no free-text searching of the accounts.

The entire package, which would appear to work only on Windows-based PCs, can be copied to, and run directly from, a computer's hard drive. This frees up the CD drive, allowing one to use the package and listen to music — presumably something by John, Paul, George and Ringo — at the same time. It did crash occasionally, on my PC, but it was not possible to determine the cause.

A number of additional papers are included, including a checklist, an informative and engaging history of the recording of Coleoptera in Warwickshire and maps showing habitat types and geology in the vice-county. These are PDF documents, meaning that they can be printed, or text copied for citation in other works. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the species accounts, which are locked into the programme, and cannot be easily copied or printed (though it is of course possible to take screen shots, as seen here).

A future version could include links to related web pages — for the Stag Beetle (Lucanus cervus), for example, to the relevant page on Wikipedia , The Natural History Museum's NBN Species Dictionary  or Bioimages 

Better still would be the transfer of the entire work to a website, which would then be available globally, could easily be updated as required, and which would allow yet more user-friendly access with text resizing, searching, copying of text, printing, bookmarking favourites, and so on. Perhaps this is something the authors might consider, once they have recouped the costs of producing this CD-ROM version? Grant funding could be sought, to support such a conversion, under the auspices of a body such as the Wildlife Trust for Warwickshire, or a museum.

In conclusion, this is a work of both historical and conservation significance, and should help to make a case for the preservation of sites where scarce species occur. Both that, and the work itself, should make the authors very proud.