Previous Publications

The earliest publication of Northants Water Bugs was by Brian Eversham and Floraint Prunier who did a paper called Identifying Water Bugs (2003). It included a key to the commoner water bugs of Northants, Beds & Cambs, a checklist of species, their status and information on monitoring. At the time there were 27 species in Northamptonshire and 38 in Peterborough.

In 2012 Henry Stanier, Sheila Brooke and Bernard Nau produced a paper called Wildlife Profiles; Water Bugs and published the the Wildlife Trust BCP to encourage recording as part of their Ecology Groups. This was a summary of the group and did not refer to recording or species present.

In 2014 Rob Ryan produced a national water bug atlas that reviewed the bugs of Northamptonshire and and across the country and created a VC32 list. In 2019 Kev Rowley reviewed that and pulled in a few missing records and also published some additional records to the list.

In 2015 this on-line Atlas for Northamptonshire was produced by Kev Rowley and has been updated annually to the present day.

Previous Recording

There are currently 7 main data sources.

Tony Cook was the previous Water Bug Recorder and when i took over however i am not aware of any recorders prior to that. There was a spreadsheet of c500 records with only 4 before 1980.

The environment agency have been recording Water Bugs in their catchment area since early 1980's and Richard Chadd has helped me to obtain a copy of that data set.

Peter Kirkby has also been recording in Northants since the 1980's especially around the Peterborough area and i have managed to obtain some of his data sets from the BRC and NBN Atlas. However there are a few more records to be pulled together.

From 2008 The Nene Valley Ecology Group have been monitoring water bugs and all their data is included in the data set especially significant numbers from Kevin Rowley, John Showers and Graham Warnes.

Since 2015 iRecord has been capturing data and all these records are now in the data set for Northants.

Some records from NBN Atlas have been pulled into the data set for the rarer species and i plan to now work on the others.

Sheila Brooke and Bernard Nau have been recording in Northants for a while and i have obtained their records from 'The Hemipterist" and National record set.