Sav­ing Scot­land’s Red Squir­rels (SSRS) hailed the “impress­ive mile­stone” thanks to a com­bin­a­tion of sight­ings sub­mit­ted by “pas­sion­ate” mem­bers of the pub­lic and ded­ic­a­tion from the organ­isa­tion’s staff and volun­teers who car­ried out “rig­or­ous mon­it­or­ing”.

The data will be uploaded to the National Biod­iversity Net­work Atlas, the UK’s largest repos­it­ory of pub­licly avail­able biod­iversity data, and will com­bine both nat­ive red squir­rels and invas­ive non-nat­ive greys.

Tom Lewis, SSRS data sup­port officer at the Scot­tish Wild­life Trust, said: “We com­bine cit­izen sci­ence and ded­ic­ated mon­it­or­ing efforts to main­tain a clear pic­ture of where red and grey squir­rels are dis­trib­uted and use this to tar­get our con­ser­va­tion efforts where they are needed.”