SSG Pantheon Workshop

Location: Preston Montford Field Centre
Start time: 10 am
End time: 4 pm (latest)

The Shropshire Spider Group has arranged, in partnership with FSC Tomorrow's Biodiversity, a one-day workshop on the online Pantheon tool. Pantheon (www.brc.ac.uk/pantheon) is an analytical tool developed by Natural England and the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) to assist invertebrate nature conservation in England. Users import lists of invertebrates into Pantheon, which then analyses the species, attaching associated habitats and resources, conservation status and other codings against them.

This workshop will demonstrate how you can use Pantheon to ‘add value’ to your species lists. It will provide some background on how Pantheon was developed, and outline the various types of information it contains, along with the caveats that you need to bear in mind when using it. We will also look at some options for presenting the results that Pantheon gives you.

We will work through some prepared examples, and please also bring some of your own species data so that you can try the system out for sites that you know. All that you need is a list of species from a site (this can be from a single sample on a single date, or from multiple samples combined).

Pantheon is a web-based system and to use it you will need a computer that is connected to the internet. Please bring your own laptop if you can, or us know if you wish to borrow a laptop when you book. (In principle it is possible to access Pantheon via a tablet browser, but it contains some quite large and complex data tables that do not display well on tablet-sized screens, and the site really needs a computer if you are to make best use of it.)

Martin Harvey will be leading this workshop. He is an entomologist and biological recorder. He works part-time at the Biological Records Centre at CEH Wallingford. In 2016 he coordinated a review of Pantheon for Natural England, working with other entomologists to steer its development, and he is a member of the Pantheon steering group. He also uses Pantheon to help analyse data from his own entomological surveys.

The workshop is free to friends of the Shropshire Spider Group, but you must book a place by emailing Nigel Cane-Honeysett: [email protected]

If you wish to borrow a laptop for the workshop, please let Nigel know when you book he will ask Rich Burkmar to organise the loan of an FSC laptop for the day.