The data
How these records were made, and how they may be used.
How the data was collected
A Robinson trap with an 80W mercury-vapour lamp, in a garden in Waunfawr, Gwynedd. Roughly weekly from 2002 to 2021: light the lamp, identify and count the moths in the morning, release them. Every record and every identification is Duncan Brown's.
Cleaned from Duncan's original workbook. 346 canonical species, 7,662 records and 25,744 individual moths across 617 trap-nights.
How to use these records
This is a passion project, not a funded survey. Duncan lit the lamp when he could, most weeks, for twenty years, and wrote down what came to it. No grant, no fixed protocol, no obligation to anyone. That is precisely what makes it rare: very few gardens anywhere hold twenty years of continuous recording.
It also means the numbers are best read as one recorder's account of one garden rather than as a controlled experiment. Where this site compares one stretch of years with another it divides by the nights the lamp actually ran, so the comparison is a fair one. Take the findings as strong indications rather than settled fact, and they will serve you well.
Download the data
- gwyfynod-species.csv Species — one row per species, with names, B&F number and statistics
- gwyfynod-records.csv Records — one row per record: date, species, count
- gwyfynod-trap-nights.csv Trap-nights — every night the lamp ran
Licence and attribution
The data is released under CC-BY 4.0. Please attribute to: Duncan Brown, moth records from a garden in Waunfawr, Gwynedd, 2002–2021. Weather comes from Open-Meteo (ERA5 archive, CC-BY 4.0), modelled for the Waunfawr area rather than measured in the garden. Moon phases are calculated.
Location
The location is given as Waunfawr, Gwynedd, and no more precisely. The grid reference is deliberately kept out of this site and these files: it is someone's home.