Many currant resources on the species covered by UKBAP such the designation native reports, NBN Gateway and other media often fail to take account of the historical distribution of invertebrates of conservation importance. Contained within the NHM collections are thousands of specimens going back to the early 19th century and beyond, showing by their labels the distribution of species dating to a period before widespread habitat loss and pollution. This is highly significant for their conservation, firstly because knowledge of former (wider) distribution can throw light on reasons for decline, and secondly because old records may show modern day recorders valuable pointers for possible additional sparse populations of rare taxa, and estimate what their geographical limits might have been under more favorable conditions.
Following on from years of Feedback to those working on these collections by conservationists regarding access to information on individual species and specimens held at the Museum, the importance of having reliably transcribed label data has been shown to be of the highest importance. This often extremely cryptic data including collectors handwritten notes, habitat data and often multiple observations from generations of collectors and researchers on particularly old material is of international use and value and this projects main aim was to make this freely available in a comprehensively checked reliable form to the whole conservation community for all UKBAP species of Coleoptera, to allow them to paint a more realistic picture of species’ distribution and status in the UK.