Lothian Wildlife Information Centre Secret Garden Survey

A series of studies carried out as part of the Lothian Secret Garden Survey to help build up a picture of the full biodiversity present in local gardens.

In order to encourage the public to record the wildlife in their gardens the Lothian Wildlife Information Centre ran the Lothian Secret Garden Survey between June 1995 and December 1996. As a result, data about easy species (i.e. not requiring specialist knowledge for identification) were recorded from 170 local gardens on specially designed survey forms. In order to learn more about the full range of species using Lothian gardens 16 of the 170 gardens were chosen for special studies by the Information Centre team. The study gardens were carefully selected to cover the full range of local garden types i.e. rural-urban, high-low altitude and large-small size. The Centre team visited each of the 16 gardens six times over the 18 month study period and on each occasion collected a wide range of invertebrate and lower plant specimens and recorded the vascular plants. Invertebrate groups recorded included molluscs, myriapods, true bugs, beetles, moths, flies, spiders and harvestmen. Lower plants recorded were fungi, bryophytes and lichens. The specimens were sent to specialists for identification.

5,400 records of 1,080 wild plants and animals were generated as a result of the study and are on the Gateway. Three of the species found were new to Scotland, many more were new to the Lothians including an RDB montane fly found in central Edinburgh.

The results of the full survey are detailed in "The Secret Garden: Report of the Lothian Secret Garden Survey" (available from The Wildlife Information Centre).

This dataset also contains data gathered from other LWIC public surveys from the same time period.