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When an expert volunteer is walking through a sunny meadow recording butterflies or searching by torchlight for newts, it can seem a long way from the negotiating halls of Convention on Biological Diversity meetings or from civil servants drafting new legislation.
But trends in species’ abundance, distribution or extinction risk, derived from monitoring and recording schemes, have wide influence in developing and monitoring environmental strategies, agreements and legislation.
Individual species status assessments underpin the lists of priority species within each of the four UK countries. For example, the Environment (Wales) Act 2016 gives Welsh ministers the responsibility ‘maintain and enhance’ species on the Section 7 list. However, many uses of species’ status information come from creating composite measures giving an overview of the status of a taxonomic group, habitat type or of species in general.
"Fiona Burns, Senior Conservation Scientist at the RSPB’s Centre for Conservation Science reflects on the vital importance of species monitoring and recording."