Thanks very much for the positive feedback about BirdTrack - even the more 'negative' comments are helpful and I'm sure we can learn from it.
We have set up a BirdTrack Working Group made up of county recorders and data managers, along with representatives from BTO and RSPB. You can read more about the group and the minutes from the first meeting in April here:
http://www.bto.org/birdtrack/bird_recording/btwg_home.htm
You're right that it will continue to improve. We are currently working on an editing facility so you can correct your mistakes online. We hope this will be up and running in the next two weeks. Looking further ahead, we have plans to produce a search facility so you can search your own records and then export them to excel, create a graph or a table.
We are also working on facilities for county bird recorders to download records (where the observer has given permission for the records to be passed on!) at whatever frequency suits. This will be very useful for county bird recorders when it is up and running. In the meantime we have been passing on BirdTrack records to recorders by email.
It may well be possible in the future to be able to export records from packages like Mapmate and import them direct into BirdTrack. At the moment we have quite a lot of built in validation of the records so we would have to create a checking process when records are imported. This is some way in the future (other priorities first) but we have given it some thought.
We can start to think about some output that includes numbers of birds rather than just presence/absence that is currently shown on the maps and graphs. Your ideas are most welcome. What do you want - a daily or weekly summary for each species or selected species? For species like Blue Tit it would be a huge table to list even the daily submissions!
BirdTrack is very much 'work in progress' and we have a lot of good plans to implement over the next couple of years. I think there is a lot of good information there at the moment (but then I'm biased!), especially the animated maps and the graphs showing the proportion of lists with a particular species. If you've got time have a look at this link and select 'Chiffchaff' from the top option (Species results and maps):
http://www.bto.org/birdtrack/dailyresults/results20.htm
What has happened to all the Chiffchaffs this summer?
Thanks to those of you already submitting your sightings. Please continue and tell your friends!
Best wishes
Dawn Balmer
BirdTrack Organiser
(on behalf of BTO, RSPB and BirdWatch Ireland)