We are aiming to fill critical data gaps by developing and applying analytical approaches, exploring new ecosystem metrics, and improving understanding and communication around the uses and limitations of the UK Terrestrial Evidence Partnership of Partnership (TEPoP) schemes. Where possible, we are also supporting improvements to these schemes and their data.
Theme: Understanding, improving, and communicating scheme coverage
Volunteers enable the collection of vast quantities of biological data that cover large areas of the UK and extend far into the past. This has allowed the monitoring of a diverse selection of species and habitats, helping to track changes in populations over time and influence conservation policy and management. However, aggregated datasets of species observations come with inherent biases. In unstructured schemes, volunteers are free to choose what, where, when, and how they want to survey. This can result in a bias towards, for example, accessible locations, convenient times, and rare or attractive species.
Terrestrial Surveillance Development and Analysis (TSDA) explored whether these patterns in sampling effort and subsequent data availability can lead to problems when using these data to produce trends. Firstly, the available data may not be geographically representative of the UK: for example, accessible areas make up a disproportionately high share of the national averages. Secondly, changes in sampling effort and distribution over time may influence findings on species’ distribution. For instance, is a species declining, or has sampling effort moved away from their preferred habitat? The data gaps described above can limit the ability to draw robust conclusions about species’ trends. One potential solution to this is to treat these gaps as ‘missing data’ and use missing data theory to bridge these gaps. Missing data is a long-standing problem, observed across many fields. There are therefore well-established methods to analyse these data while accounting for any gaps. TSDA explored different approaches to this.
Many of the sampling biases observed in unstructured schemes have been, at least partially, mitigated by the survey design of structured monitoring schemes in which volunteers are steered towards recording following a protocol, at more randomly selected locations across the country. This means that the data collected are more representative of the UK. However, due to differing levels of uptake between suggested sampling locations, there is still the chance that areas containing habitats or species more interesting to volunteers, or those closer to population centres, are more likely to be surveyed. TSDA has explored this variation in coverage across the UK, and more recently has evaluated the barriers, challenges and solutions to improving biological recording in Northern Ireland. While efforts are made by many schemes to minimise the effects of bias, some will always remain. This should therefore be communicated when presenting results. In reality, there are differing levels of detail when it comes to bias reporting within surveillance schemes. This can vary depending on the type of bias and the scheme itself.
If you are interested in getting involved or finding out more about any of the tasks below, sign up here. Current TSDA tasks under this theme include:
Communicating scheme coverage: TSDA is currently developing more consistent ways of communicating coverage and bias across schemes.
Publications:
Treating gaps and biases in biodiversity data as a missing data problem: report and video
An assessment of the barriers, challenges and solutions to improving biological recording in Northern Ireland: video
Assessing the communication of bias in UK monitoring schemes: report
Theme: Indicators of Ecosystem Health
Developing a more comprehensive measure of ecosystem health was highlighted in a 2018 TSDA needs assessment as desirable across the four UK countries. Assessment of ecosystem health ideally needs to be based on a broader-scale and more comprehensive assessment of species, including the composition of ecological communities, compared to current measures. Work in TSDA phase 1 started to explore how data from UKTEPoP schemes might contribute to our understanding of community composition.
In TSDA phase 2, we are currently exploring how data collected about different species in the same location can help to understand the health of the ecosystem. This involves assessing the benefits and challenges of combining these datasets and developing indicators that reflect the state of multiple species, especially when faced with environmental pressures such as climate change.
If you are interested in getting involved or finding out more about any of the tasks below, sign up here. Current TSDA tasks under this theme include:
Scoping the potential for multi-taxon analysis using co-located data: TSDA is exploring whether the co-located species data from the Tracking the Impact project, collected using UKTEPoP scheme methods can be used to undertake cross-taxon analysis and generate multi-species indicators.
Find out more about this task in this video.
Development of climate change adaptation indicators: There is growing evidence for climate change impacts on the natural environment, including in the UK. Whilst there is a clear push for net zero to limit greenhouse gas emissions, there is also an adaptation gap which needs to be addressed. Given the relative lack of evidence about climate change adaptation for biodiversity, there is an urgent need for monitoring and evaluation of adaptation interventions to track progress and identify what works. Current TSDA work has identified a number of possible adaptation indicators, and is developing these potential draft adaptation indicators for further consideration and reporting.
Find out more about the task in this video.
Exploring the integration of freshwater data sets across schemes: Freshwaters in the UK support a large amount of biodiversity of conservation value, and yet are subject to a range of pressures and policy impacts, ranging from pollution to drought. TSDA is currently exploring the potential for freshwater UKTEPoP data to be used in temporal and spatial analyses, to identify potentially novel patterns in the data across time and space, that may provide previously undetected signals of environmental changes in the freshwater environment. It is expected that this will be used to identify further analyses to be undertaken through the TSDA partnership.
Find out more about this task in this video.
Theme: Methods to test impacts of interventions
TSDA phase 1 previously explored how UKTEPoP data could inform us on how various pressures and management were influencing UK species. This included work assessing impacts from air pollution and invasive species. We also considered the effectiveness of the UK’s protected area network in conserving biodiversity. Making these links between biodiversity data and pressures or interventions can be challenging, especially at small spatial scales, because there are fewer data for examining trends and drivers and the simultaneous action of multiple stressors. In TSDA phase 2, we will explore new approaches to analysing UKTEPoP data, to try and better understand associations between interventions and biodiversity.
If you are interested in getting involved or finding out more about any of the tasks below, sign up here. Current TSDA tasks under this theme include:
Trialling approaches for impact evaluation with unstructured datasets: Our attempts at attributing drivers of change to species trends have been limited to relatively coarse simple regression analysis, potentially being affected by confounding variables. However, new approaches for attribution are being applied in ecology that can make more efficient use of data, essentially by reverse-engineering quasi-experimental conditions out of observational field data. In this task, we will trial the application of approaches for impact evaluation, focusing on unstructured datasets from schemes supported by the Biological Records Centre.
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