Vice-county

Vice-counties of Great Britain and the Isle of Man (Orkney and Shetland not shown)
Map showing detailed differences between Derbyshire vice-county (VC57) and the modern administrative county of Derbyshire, England

A vice-county (also spelled vice county)[1] is a geographical division of the British Isles. It is also called biological vice-county[1] as it is used for purposes of biological recording and other scientific data-gathering, or sometimes called a Watsonian vice-county as vice-counties were introduced by Hewett Cottrell Watson in the third volume of his Cybele Britannica, published in 1852.[2] Watson's vice-counties were based on the ancient counties of Britain, but often subdividing these boundaries to create smaller, more uniform units, and considering exclaves to be part of the surrounding vice-county.

In 1901 Robert Lloyd Praeger introduced a similar system for Ireland and its off-shore islands.[1][2]

Vice-counties are the "standard geographical area for county based [...] recording".[3] They provide a stable basis for recording using similarly sized units, and, although National Grid-based reporting has grown in popularity, vice-counties remain a useful mapping boundary, employed in many regional surveys, especially county floras and national lists. This allows data collected over long periods of time to be compared easily. The vice-counties remain unchanged by subsequent local government reorganisations, allowing historical and modern data to be more accurately compared.[4]

In 2002, to mark the 150th anniversary of the introduction of the Watsonian vice-county system, the NBN Trust commissioned the digitisation of the 112 vice-county boundaries for England, Scotland and Wales, based on 420 original one-inch to the mile maps annotated by Dandy in 1947, and held at the Natural History Museum, London. The resulting datafiles were much more detailed than anything readily available to recorders up to that point, and were made freely available (as a beta version). Intended for use with modern GIS and biological recording software, a final 'standard' version was released in 2008.[5][6] Up until that point, county recorders only had general access to a set of two fold-out vice-county maps covering the entirety of Great Britain, published in 1969.[7]

  1. ^ a b c Webb, D. A. (1980), "The Biological Vice-Counties of Ireland", Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 80B: 179–196, JSTOR 20494359
  2. ^ a b Vincent, Peter J. (1990), "Recording species distributions", A Biogeography of the British Isles: an Introduction, Routledge, pp. 48–73, ISBN 978-0-415-03471-5
  3. ^ Vice-county map of Britain and Ireland, British Bryological Society, retrieved 31 May 2016
  4. ^ Stace, C. A.; Ellis, R. G.; Kent, D. H. & McCosh, D. J. (2003), Vice-county Census Catalogue of The Vascular Plants of Great Britain, London: Botanical Society of the British Isles, ISBN 0 901158 30 5
  5. ^ Sharing Information about Wildlife: Useful Things, National Biodiversity Network, archived from the original on 4 March 2016, retrieved 8 April 2021
  6. ^ "Watsonian vice county boundaries GIS layers". GitHub. 5 June 2019. Retrieved 8 April 2021.
  7. ^ Dandy, J. E. (1969), Watsonian vice-counties of Great Britain, vol. Publication no. 146, Ray Society, London