Information

The purpose of the Garden Moth Scheme (GMS) is to try to find out what is happening to our common garden moths. This is particularly relevant following a series of reports on “The State of Britain’s Larger Moths”, published by Butterfly Conservation over the years. The most recent of these reports, dated 2021, concludes that the number of species that are declining is more than four times the number that are increasing.

The GMS collects data from The United Kingdom, The Republic of Ireland and the Channel Islands.

Many people already trap moths in their gardens across the country on a regular basis. We aim to add value to their data by providing them with a framework that encourages them to record common moths in a standard fashion, leading to statistically more robust data.

The GMS database now contains well over 1 million records of many of our commonest species of moth from all areas of the UK and Ireland, making it a hugely valuable resource.

The GMS dataset has repeatedly provided anonymised data to academic institutions and therefore has been cited in articles in various peer reviewed journals.

For more information on how to take part, check out the instructions here.

Indentifying Moths

The core species list can be found here, and there are links from each species to UK-Moths.

GMS have also produced some useful tips for moth'ers:

• GMS Moth Tips #1. What you need to get started in garden moth trapping.
• GMS Moth Tips #2. Identification of macro-moth families and sub-families.
• GMS Moth Tips #3. Identification of micro-moth families.