NEW ATLAS OF THE BRITISH & IRISH FLORA

The New Atlas of the British & Irish Flora is truly a remarkable and impressive book. One is struck first by its physical scale: 910 pages, 12 inches by 10 inches and weight approximately 9 lb. It is clearly not intended as a field manual or for reading in bed. Secondly: the scale of the project that culminated in its publication was vast. Many years of work by over 1600 volunteers have gone into the gathering, collating and checking of the field records. Then, the organisation of the records into the book, and creation of the computer databases from more than 9 million records, must also have been a Herculean task. The book is a testament to the dedication and commitment of all the skilled and knowledgeable botanists and statisticians involved in its creation.

The main purpose of the book is to provide distribution maps and brief descriptions of the habitats of 2412 flowering plants and ferns in Great Britain and Ireland. It presents an up-to-date summary of the range of British and Irish plant species and replaces the previous Atlas of the British Flora (1962). It shows large numbers of changes over the last forty years in range and frequency of many species. All native species and all commoner hybrids and introduced species are covered, plus a wide range of subspecies.

Introductory chapters explain the history and scope of the project and tie it in with the 1962 Atlas. Subsequent chapters deal with the coverage of the New Atlas and the organisation of the recording. These are useful and interesting. However, more interesting is Chapter 7, “The changing flora of Britain, 1930-99”. This outlines the trends in the distribution of native species over the 70-year period, listing those which have been successful and unsuccessful. It provides a summary of the influences that have contributed to the changes.

Chapter 8, “Species accounts”, covers 810 pages. This includes distribution maps and short accompanying text for 2412 taxa. Taxonomy and nomenclature follow Stace’s New Flora of the British Isles (1997). The order in which the taxa appear also follows Stace (1997). The maps show the distribution of each species in 100-km squares in Britain and Ireland. Coloured symbols differentiate occurrences of native or alien species in each of the periods 1987-99, 1970-86, and pre-1970.

A CD-ROM accompanies the book. In addition to providing electronic copy of the maps and text for each species in the book, the CD-ROM summarises over 940 rare aliens. Computer users are enabled to view and print distribution maps, captions and associated tables, as well as manipulate the data to produce additional maps and produce co-incidence maps with overlaid environmental information.

The New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora will be of use mainly to recorders and conservation research workers. While it is simply a recording device, the information within is of immense potential value. Many amateur naturalists will not want to lay out the money to buy it, but most would find much fascination in poring over its pages. The rate of change of species distribution is so fast that authors of identification and field guidebooks cannot keep pace; this Atlas provides the latest data for the keen naturalist.

It is heartening to see so many names of our own SNS recorders, past and present listed among the contributors to the Atlas, including of course, the late, dear Enid Hyde.

New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora, Preston,C.D., Pearman, D.A., Dines, T.D., 2002, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-851076-5

David Walker

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