Monitoring strategies
Developing monitoring strategies
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.
JNCC has considerable experience in developing monitoring strategies, in both the terrestrial and marine environments, 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. 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.
- 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 not only the status of the environment and how the environment is changing, but also 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.
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