By Maddie Harris
In our latest blog post, Senior Ecosystem Analyst Maddie Harris, highlights a recent study, which explores the roles citizen scientists could play in recording habitat data.
Recording habitat data is important to meet a broad range of conservation aims, such as evaluating management strategies, identifying areas and drivers of change, and improving our understanding of species-habitat associations. It can also be used to validate data from satellites which could help us to create country-wide habitat maps.
Typically, our monitoring schemes focus on species. We rely on thousands of volunteer 'citizen scientists' to record a variety of types of animal and plant all over the country, to help us produce population trends that are published as Official Statistics. While some of our recording schemes do ask volunteers to include habitat records in what they submit, we wondered if there were opportunities to work together to collect even more.
So last year, we asked you (both current citizen scientists and the wider public) what you thought of this – is there interest among current recorders and the wider public to take part in habitat recording? A huge thank you to every one of the 458 people who responded to our survey. We’ve just published the report (JNCC Report 769 – A survey of volunteer interest in recording habitat data), which summarises the results from the survey.
Overall, the survey demonstrated a fairly high level of interest and self-assessed confidence in recording habitat data. This suggests that it could be feasible to encourage citizen scientists to collect more habitat data. Whilst it’s important to recognise that there may be a bias in respondents to the survey, as people who are already interested in this topic are most likely to complete a survey on habitat recording, the relatively high number of survey participants overall provides evidence that such an initiative is likely to be feasible.
We also learnt a lot about what people might like habitat surveying to look like, and which factors would be the biggest barriers to people participating. For example, it was clear that to maximise participation, it would be important to minimise the time commitment required, provide training, and ensure that volunteers get feedback about how the habitat is changing over time, what their habitat data mean, what the data are used for, and how they can improve their recording skills further.
We are now working on developing a forward plan for how best to implement the collection of additional habitat data with citizen scientists across the UK, based on engagement with relevant stakeholders and results from the survey.
If you’re interested in getting involved in any of our current monitoring schemes, take a look at our Surveillance schemes webpage, which has links to our partner websites where you can sign up. You can also sign up to our 'Focus groups' mailing list if you are interested in receiving occasional invitations to take part in focus groups or other feedback activities to support and improve volunteer-based biological recording and monitoring during the coming 5 years. And keep an eye out for future updates on opportunities to help record habitat data specifically!
This work was supported by the Terrestrial Surveillance Development and Analysis Partnership, comprised of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UK CEH), British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) and JNCC. Find out more in the report: JNCC Report 769 – A survey of volunteer interest in recording habitat data.
Wildflower meadow image courtesy of pixabay.