As this is #Volunteers week, it’s a good time to review the surveys that are undertaken to check on the creatures we share planet Earth with. Here’s a selection, from the United Kingdom.
Bats Conservation UK states
The National Bat Monitoring Programme surveys are carefully designed so that anybody can take part in monitoring these fascinating but easily overlooked mammals. There are many different surveys – sunset, sunrise, waterways, woodland, hibernation – check what survey is right for you here.
Continues: As well as being of great value to bat conservation, the surveys are fun and rewarding to carry out. They usually involve visiting a roost or potential foraging site on two evenings in the summer. We run different surveys which cater to different levels of experience and knowledge.
The British Trust for Ornithology – BTO – arranges a Breeding Bird Survey amongst others.
The Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) was launched in 1994 and is a partnership jointly funded by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC). The scheme involves thousands of volunteer birdwatchers carrying out standardised annual counts on randomly-located 1km sites up and down the UK. These annual counts enable us to monitor the population changes of over 115 of the UK’s most common
breeding birds, providing an important indicator of the health of the countryside. The annual BBS report is a celebration of the hard work put into the scheme by our volunteers and enables the BBS to
display and discuss population changes of the UK’s breeding birds at a country, an English region level and across the UK as a whole, and the survey data and trends are used widely to set priorities
and inform conservation science. By Gill Birtles, BTO
If Mammals are more your thing, the Mammal Society undertakes a huge list with various partners – including the state of mammals report :
We have been working with partners focused on other groups of plants and animals to develop the 2019 assessment of the State of Nature. The State of Nature partnership is a grouping of over fifty nature conservation organisations which together have already produced two reviews of the status of wildlife in the UK and its Crown Dependences and Overseas Territories.
Let’s go seaward, with SeaWatch Foundation
SeaWatch is a national charity whose prime purpose is to monitor cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) in British and Irish waters for their conservation. We have a project called the Cardigan Bay Monitoring Project which is run from the base we have in New Quay, Ceredigion
ORCA Marine Mammal surveys provide great opportunities for training and learning
*** If any surveys were missed, please let us know in comments. ***
