From the early stages of planning the Bird Atlas book it was apparent that we couldn't include all of the maps for all of the species and we intended to produce an online resource in the future. We made reference to this in the book on page 150 but we have since changed the name!

On Tuesday the BTO will be launching "Mapstore" on the Bird Atlas website. This is a repository or 'storage' of all atlas maps from all past and current atlases. It is just the maps, no text or statistics. This is a fantastic free resource which complements the Bird Atlas 2007-11 book by presenting maps for all of the species recorded during fieldwork (not just for the 296 species presented in the book). These include the 20-year change maps which were not presented in the book, plus many extra change and relative abundance maps. Abundance maps from the 1981-84 Winter Atlas and 1988-91 Breeding Atlas are not included. Maps at the 10-km scale are also included for some species that were confidential in previous atlases but are no longer, for example Red Kite.

The Bird Atlas 2007-11 book provides expert interpretation of the maps and discussion of the causes of change (where known) and vital background information on the methods to aid interpretation of the maps and statistics within the book. This new resource incorporates "sliders" to seamlessly view maps through time and see how patterns have changed. We hope that Mapstore will showcase the wealth of atlas information available.

Mapstore will be accessible from the Bird Atlas website www.birdatlas.net from Tuesday.