This year, one of our major activities has been to create a set of over-arching principles to help guide the establishment and development of environmental monitoring programmes. These principles are intended for a wide range of stakeholders, from professional surveyors to community scientists.

Environmental monitoring is essential for tracking, understanding, and responding to environmental changes, as well as supporting environmental regulation. Typically, monitoring programmes are created to serve specific purposes. While they can often be adapted or linked to address new environmental questions, the increasing diversification of policy agendas and methodologies has made this more challenging, especially when assessing changes on a UK-wide scale. Therefore, a more strategic approach to the UK’s monitoring evidence base is necessary to maximise the scientific and policy value of the outputs. Our principles are designed to support this strategic approach.

Graphical presentation of the nine principles
The nine principles cover aspects such as designing a monitoring programme, aligning it with existing monitoring where possible, planning the programme's outputs and designing for sustainability. 

Following these principles will help ensure that any new or revised monitoring programme is effective and efficient in achieving its primary objectives. Where possible, the principles should also enable the programme to contribute to and benefit from other initiatives with similar goals, thereby enhancing the UK’s environmental monitoring capabilities from regional to national levels.

We introduced our nine principles to delegates at the National Environmental Monitoring Conference in Liverpool on December 10th. This event was jointly organised by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, the British Ecological Society, and UKEOF.