The complexity of the natural environment, coupled with limited monitoring resources, both financial and material, mean that environmental monitoring schemes need to be well designed and targeted. A well-designed strategy helps us to concentrate our efforts on activities that deliver best for what we want to get out of the monitoring in the most effective way. The JNCC Terrestrial Biodiversity Evidence Strategy defines the main objectives of what environmental data we collect and analyse to facilitate a better understanding of biodiversity at a range of scales, from species’ genetics right up to healthy functioning ecosystem.
This Terrestrial Strategy is aligned with the overall JNCC Together for Nature Strategy, and with our UK Programme Roadmap - developed to define how JNCC intends to reach our organisational strategic goals.
JNCC has considerable experience in developing scheme-specific strategies to ensure that monitoring schemes are fit-for-purpose and cost effective. We bring together a sound understanding of the natural environment, the issues facing the environment, and emerging policy requirements, with insight into how evidence sources can support these, to provide strategic advice on how to maximise investment from monitoring schemes.
Working in partnership with taxon specialist organisations, many of whom also have a wide network of volunteers that can be engaged in monitoring activities, enables us to harness the best expertise to make such large-scale biodiversity monitoring possible. We work with our partners to ensure that resources are effectively and efficiently deployed to provide a good return, in terms of value for money, data coverage, and data use, and continually seek improvements and further efficiencies.
In addition to ensuring monitoring schemes offer value for money, our strategic approaches are designed to:
- Demonstrate the multiple uses of the data gathered: we demonstrate how data can be used and re-used in a variety of ways, to ensure it can address different needs or questions and be of value to a range of users.
- Identify critical gaps: taking a strategic approach enables us to identify areas that aren’t being adequately covered through existing schemes and propose options for addressing these.
- Create standards and guidance: in developing and providing protocols we can ensure standardisation and consistency in data gathering to aid analysis.
- Develop local and multi-scale monitoring: in addition to the flagship national monitoring schemes, many of which have run for several decades, JNCC is responding to the need for biodiversity monitoring to deliver for a range of local and regional initiatives. We are developing tools and processes to facilitate monitoring that is compatible and translatable at multiple scales
- Make improvements to the evidence base: we assess the quality of the data produced and the analyses undertaken, and propose options for making the data more robust, and to enable it to produce a broader picture of the status of the environment and how the environment is changing, as well as what is driving the change, and the impacts of any interventions
- Secure future investment in monitoring programmes: evidence of how strategies are improving the efficiency and outputs of monitoring helps to secure future sources of income.
Examples of how we are using monitoring schemes to inform the development of conservation and recovery policy can be found in JNCC’s latest Impact Review.
Volunteer-based species recording schemes are at the heart of what JNCC does. Complemented by innovations in environmental monitoring such as satellite technology, DNA, and acoustics we are helping to gain a sharper picture of how nature is faring, allowing us to measure progress and target action to help nature recovery. This work is an important part of JNCC’s strategic priorities.
JNCC is part of the Terrestrial Surveillance Development and Analysis (TSDA) partnership, along with the UK Centre of Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH) and the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO). The project aims to develop and enhance volunteer recording schemes and their use of data to address policy-relevant questions about biodiversity. You can read about this work in the TSDA Strategy 2022 to 2027.
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