What is the source of NHICs data?
NHIC’s Element Occurrence (EO) data is the product of the review and quality checking of many data sources. Personal accounts of rare species are reported to NHIC and incorporated into the database. The majority of the EO data comes from existing data sets. These include the Atlas of Rare Vascular Plants of Ontario, COSEWIC Rare Vascular Plant Database, the Ontario Fish Distribution Database, the Ontario Herpetofaunal Summary, Ontario Rare Breeding Bird Program, Atlas of the Breeding Birds of Ontario, Ontario Butterfly Atlas, Ontario Aquatic Invertebrate Database, and several other data sets. The sources for the Natural Areas in NHIC’s Natural Areas database are also varied. These include ANSI reports, natural area inventories, consultant reports, International Biological Programme reports, wetland evaluations and others. The NHIC records the source of the data in the databases for both EO’s and Natural Areas.
