Lancashire Butterfly and Day-Flying Moth Sightings Submission

In order to avoid duplication of records, please do not send sightings submitted on this page separately to the county recorder or other organisations such as iRecord or Butterfly Conservation.

View sightings reports. Hide help. If you are having trouble submitting a sighting with this page, please contact sightings@lancashire-butterflies.org.uk for support.

Required fields are denoted by *.

Contact Details *
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Sighting Date and Location *
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Sighting Species Butterfly Moth*
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Extra Details





By clicking the Submit Sighting button, you are agreeing to the terms and conditions of the use of this web-page. In particular, please note that some site descriptions will not be published publicly.

Sighting Submission Form Help

The sighting submission form allows information relating to a particular sighting to be recorded. The information will automatically appear in the tabulated sighting data in the Sightings page once the sighting has been successfully submitted.

The information relating to the sighting is separated into groups: Contact Details, Sighting Location, Sighting Species and Extra Details. Each group contains a number of fields, some of which may be mandatory, such as recorder name. The mandatory fields are denoted with an asterisk, *, and valid values for these fields must be supplied for a sighting to be submitted successfully. The tab button can be used to quickly move to the next entry field. Hovering the mouse cursor on an input box provides a comment on the particular type of value.

A sighting can be submitted for processing by clicking the Submit Sighting button. The system will then analyse the data for validity and the sighting will be added to the records if this process is successful. A green tick denotes the successful entry of a sighting. A red cross denotes an unsuccessful submission, which will require modification. If the data are missing or deemed invalid, they will reappear in the form, along with a list of the issues found. The problem fields will be marked and these should be modified before attempting a further submission of the sighting data.

The type of species can be chosen from the appropriate group of butterflies or day-flying moths by using the Group radio buttons. Please note that this sightings page is not able to accept night-flying moths. Sightings of different group species with the same information values, such as date and location, must be entered by a fresh submission form entry. The successful sightings will be grouped on the sightings page within the same band of colour.

If the observed species does not appear in the Species drop-down menu, please select Unlisted at the bottom of the list and include the name of the species in the comments section. Once validated, the sighting will be updated to include the newly observed species and the name will be included in the drop-down list for future users of the site.

The grid reference may be entered manually from a GPS device or OS grid reference found from a map, or by use of the interactive map on the submission page. A help page about using the interactive map is provided and can be viewed by clicking the link at the top of the page.

The support for comments includes hash-tagged words which can be searched for in the Advanced mode of the Sightings display page. For example, entering #unusual in comment could be used to flag this sighting as unexpected, although any word can be hash-tagged.

An image corresponding to the sighting may be uploaded by selecting a file on the machine used to access the submission form. If this step is successful, a link to the image will appear in the tabulated data on the Sightings page.

Once an image has been uploaded, there is the option to post the sighting and image to any branch social media accounts, such as on Twitter. The Social media checkbox can be selected or deselected depending on whether the reporter accepts their sighting and image to appear on social media. The Attribution checkbox can be selected or deselected depending on whether the reporter would like a copyright statement, including their name, to be associated with the image on social media.

The values for the fields of the Contact Details group are stored in a cookie on the machine used to access the website. These values are restored next time the submission page is accessed and the values for the Sighting Location group are remembered within a particular session. This behaviour reduces the effort required to submit a series of sightings.

This help message can be hidden by selecting the Hide Help link at the top of the page