Maps of the Bryophytes of Kent

compiled by Alice Gertrude Side (1911 – 1988)

In 1970 Trudy Side published ‘An Atlas of the Bryophytes found in Kent’ (Transactions of the Kent Field Club Vol. 4. 140pp.). This mapped the distribution of all known species on a ten-km square basis. As an adjunct to her notebooks she also maintained a set of tetrad distribution maps, hand-plotted on a very basic outline of the administrative county of Kent. As there seemed little prospect of Trudy’s records being added to an electronic database, two Kent Field Club members, Laurence Clemons and John Taplin, in 2000 embarked on a project to digitise the maps using the software packages DMAP for Windows and DMAP Digitizer for Windows developed by Alan Morton. LC provided a name file and outline map of Watsonian Kent (VCs 15 and 16) whilst JT scanned the base maps and laboriously digitised each of over 21 000 dots. Unfortunately the post-1970 distribution maps did not cover that part of VC 16 now included in Greater London and, with other gaps, the overall coverage was 837 tetrads out of 1120 comprising the whole Watsonian county.

David Newman has incorporated the metafiles produced by DMAP into a series of indexed web-pages. These pages may be opened into a new window if the user so chooses by holding down the shift-key (if using Microsoft Internet Explorer) when clicking on the map link.

Index to Species

Map showing coverage and number of species recorded per tetrad