Do you need a better understanding of the breadth and availability of environmental monitoring activities operating across the UK? Could you benefit more from the evidence they produce with respect to informing current environmental policy, helping set targets for conservation and landscape management projects, or simply improving your scientific understanding of the natural world? As a researcher and/or practitioner, it’s likely you struggle to determine what evidence is already available and how to find it.
This one-day conference, taking place the day before the BES Annual Meeting, will bring together those who either deliver, use, or could benefit from information provided from a wide range of national monitoring activities across the four nations. The aim is to increase the visibility of what is already available, explain how best to access it and to identify critical gaps in the current evidence portfolio, and explore opportunities for the community to develop a more cohesive approach to developing the UK’s environmental evidence system.
The focus will be on evidence collected at national scale using a variety of approaches from citizen science to structured schemes which target air quality, climate and greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity and habitat condition, soil health, fresh, coastal and marine water quality, and their integration. Whilst providing evidence for national and international reporting requirements, these schemes also provide data at more local and regional scape and can be used to provide benchmarks for individual projects.
This Conference is organised by the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology with support from the British Ecological Society and the UK Environmental Observation Framework. The organisers will invite speakers from a diversity of UK organisations to share information about monitoring projects and, importantly, where to access the data. They will also be considering whether there are opportunities for integrating sampling sites and data across schemes for a more cohesive approach. There will be an opportunity for monitoring programmes that were not allocated a speaking slot due to time limitations, to share information on their work through an online portal alongside the talks presented on the day with conference delegates.