1. What data or information on location, abundance, condition or importance of species and habitats (and/or the ecosystem services they provide) is i) essential ii) important or iii) 'nice to have' for you to meet your local delivery priorities?
i) Essential
• Up-to-date data on land use data and phase one habitat maps
• Protected & notable species
• Local Wildlife and Geological Sites (included proposed sites)
• Biodiversity Opportunity Areas
• Data on habitat condition
• GI mapping and associated ecosystem services
• Local data on the risks from climate change
ii) Important
• Species abundance and distribution
• Maps of agri-environment options and predicted delivery
iii) Nice to have
• Local data from each national dataset
• Access to BARS records as a map file
2. To what extent is this information available to you?
The Local Records Centre is a valuable resource and provides:
- Biannual update of protected & notable species data
- Annual update of Local Wildlife and Geological Sites (included proposed sites)
- Biennial update of Priority Habitats & Land Use
- Biodiversity Opportunity Areas (Berks)
NE also has a lot of data available on their GIS page
3. What are the key gaps in data or information on species and habitats or barriers to their use?
Barriers to use:
Organisations who are not a funding partner of TVERC, or do not pay for a data licence are unable to access the information.
The data TVERC hold in our database takes time to collect and manage. This work is carried out by both volunteers and paid staff to ensure the data held and provided to you is of a high quality and we can keep our charges as low as possible. Our funding partners (local authorities, Natural England, Environment Agency) cover the cost of part of this work through annual funding agreements. Currently the only way for private sector organisations, individuals or community groups to contribute is by paying for data services at the point of use, when they request a data search. As a non-profit organisation, TVERC uses our income to sustain the services we provide to the local recording community, who in turn share their data with us, so we can share it with everyone else. The cost of collating and managing the TVERC database is spread between all our funding sources, which results in economies of scale for everyone.
Data gaps:
- Up- to-date data on land use. Although Berkshire's land use mapping has 90% coverage, a lot of this is now out of date.
- Data on habitat condition outside of protected areas.
- The Local Wildlife Sites dataset is not fully up-to-date. We only have recent survey information on about 70% of the sites due to a lack of funding to carry out a sufficient number of botanical surveys each year. We do not have any funding to carry out species surveys and rely on volunteer surveyors, so there is a significant gap here too.
- Information on ecosystem services and their value to the community
- Identification of where GI would be best targeted to create a functioning network.
4. What improvements in the provision of data or information on species and habitats would make your activities more effective? (Please specify the one thing that you think would make the greatest difference)
Up to date land use maps and the identification of ecosystem services.