London has a wealth of wildlife living in the capital's wild places, green spaces and Londoners' own gardens.

Urban species are special because they can provide daily encounters that connect city dwellers to nature. These species may also come under particular urban pressures. Knowing which species live alongside us in London, where they are and which habitats are important to them,  helps efforts to protect, conserve and engage people with the capital's wildlife.

We manage records in different sub-sets that are useful for our users.

Click on the pictures to find out more about >>

                      Protected Species             Historic Records               Invasive Species        

The GiGL partnership database includes species records from a wide range of recording organisations and individuals. There are expert volunteer recorders, professional surveyors and keen eyed members of the public recording the wildlife they see all over the capital.

We now have an impressive 2 million species records in the database!

This is a great achievement for the GiGL partnership and is helping to build a strong baseline of biodiversity information for the capital. 

<< Click the London chart to see more about the different species groups in the database.

We accept records of any species that has been positively identified in Greater London. This includes ‘common or garden’ species as well as rarer sightings.  See our Submit Records section for how to do this.

Very many of our records come from expert recording groups or professional surveyors.  But, we take the view that encouraging  recording and future experts is also important, so we accept records from the public as well as verified sources. 

We do take validation (record is sensible) and verification (record is correctly identified) seriously however. The correct identification, especially of rare or protected species, can have consequences for conservation and management. The GiGL Recorder Advisory Group includes species experts who volunteer to check the identification of unverified records in the GiGL database, starting with priority species. Other records are verified by the expertise of the data provider (see GiGLer article), and GiGL can help with this process by initially digitising records to speed up checking.  See our policies. 

If you already pass on your species records to a recording group or local authority (see partner list) your data may come to us from them - get in touch and we can check, to avoid duplication.