Downloadable British and European Lists

There are not infrequently requests from the group for a copy of the British or European list, so that people can start their own database/spreadsheet without huge amounts of typing. Although the official British List is available from the BOU, I am not aware of any such list available on the Web in a general layout that can easily be loaded into a spreadsheet/database.

So I've done a couple of dumps from my own private database. This is now, after various earlier forms, based on the 1984 Howard & Moore list (which in turn mainly uses the Peters list) with some later taxonomic changes added.

CAVEAT: this is not an up-to-date list; it started in the 1980's, and new species which have been first recorded in recent years have only been added if I happened to come across them. If you want a definitive British list, you need to get the BOU British List and then work out how to do any formatting you might need.

However if you are just looking for something to kick-start your own database, my lists contain all but a few of the rarest species and recent splits (512 and 647 species respectively).

The layout is CSV - Comma Separated Variable - which I understand to be supported by most spreadsheets and databases. (My PC actually produces semicolons for some reason, but they seem to work just as well as commas.)

The columns are as follows:

1. Sequence number;
2. English name;
3. Scientific name;
4. Status:
   • x: regularly occurring
   • r: rare vagrant
   • i: introduced species
   • b: not seen in recent years (BOU category B)

To use one of the lists:

1. Open it from the link below (they're not that big - about 30 Kb);
2. Save it to disk;
3. Load it into your favourite spreadsheet or database. (Note: in recent versions of Excel it appears one needs to import the file rather than simply opening it.)

Download the British list

Download the European list

I would be grateful if you could let me know of any errors you come across, or any omissions of common species.