Watsonian vice-counties

Watsonian vice-counties are subdivisions of Great Britain and Ireland used largely for the purposes of biological recording and other scientific data-gathering.

The vice-counties are 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 vice county in which they locally lie. They provide a stable basis for recording using similarly-sized units, and, although grid-based reporting has grown in popularity, they remain a standard in the vast majority of ecological surveys, allowing data collected over long periods of time to be compared easily.

The vice-counties were introduced in Hewett Cottrell Watson who first used them in the third volume of his "Cybele Britannica" published in 1852. He refined the system somewhat in later volumes. The vice-counties remain unchanged by subsequent local government reorganisations, allowing historical and modern data to be more accurately compared.

Every vice-county in Britain has a name, and additionally, they are numbered from 1 to 112. Vice counties in Ireland are numbered from H1 to H40.

List of vice-counties

Vice counties listed by county

ee also

*Subdivisions of England
*Subdivisions of Scotland
*Subdivisions of Wales
*Subdivisions of Northern Ireland
*Counties of Ireland

References

* [http://rbg-web2.rbge.org.uk/bbs/Recording/vcmappage.htm Vice-county map from the British Bryological Society]
* [http://www.nbn.org.uk/downloads/files/Vice%20County%20Boundaries%20Project%20Report.pdf Report on a project to store maps defining vice county boundaries in digital format] The report contains details of the origins of the Vice-counties (PDF).

External links

* [http://www.searchnbn.net/directory/browseAdminSites.jsp?asl2Key=15 National Biodiversity Network vice-county browser]
* [http://www.searchnbn.net/siteNavigator/siteNavigator.jsp Interactive map which displays vice-counties alongside other boundary types]
* [http://herbariaunited.org/gridrefVC/ OS grid reference to vice-county conversion utility]