Happy 5th Birthday ALERC!

Issue 5 - June 2014

All the latest news from around the LRC community Happy

5th Birthday

ALERC!Biodiversity Offsetting – a New Use for LRC Data?

Tom Hunt – ALERC National Coordinator

ALERC is currently contributing to a project to investigate the feasibility of a decision support tool for biodiversity offsetting, should Defra give this policy the go ahead. Biodi-versity Offsetting is a proposed government policy designed to make it easier for some developments to take place, where certain habitats (and also possibly protected spe-cies), which cannot be mitigated for on-site, could be recreated elsewhere if it can be proved that it is ecologically and economi-cally viable to do so. By allowing developers to do this it should be possible for planning decisions to be made quicker, more effi cient and provide greater certainty to the con-struction and infrastructure industry whilst still maintaining the total level of biodiversi-ty with in an area. It remains to be seen if this is workable and the policy is still under scrutiny.

Should this policy be enacted, a whole new set of decisions will have to be made by de-velopers, consultants and planners on the appropriateness and location of potential new habitat offsets. It is with this in mind that Bill Butcher of eCountability Ltd developed the idea that habitat suitability modelling ex-ercises could be used to inform offsetting decisions, if incorporated into a user inter-face. The opportunity to test this idea has

Inside

National Harvest Mouse SurveyUse of ALERC survey dataGet the pictureNews in brief

www.alerc.org.uk @alerc_nc [email protected]

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ALERC

Picture courtesy of Roy Rimmer

www.alerc.org.uk Page 2 [email protected]

LRC Matter s Issue 3 June 2014

come about thanks to an award from the Technology Strate-gy Board, which is funding a six month project from April to September 2014 as part of its “Solving Business Problems with Environmental Data” funding competition. The project is being executed by a consortium including ALERC, For-est Research, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and led by eCountability.

ALERC’s role is to coordinate LRC input into the project, in the form of habitat and species records, and to assist in the selection of the study areas. By assessing information on LRC data holdings, development pressure and willingness to be involved, four LRC areas were selected. These are Wiltshire and Swindon, Greater Manchester, Sussex and Greater London (where only specifi c boroughs are being looked at). Data has been gathered from these LRCs and the project has moved into the modelling stage, which will combine LRC habitat data with CEH land cover map data, and then LRC species records to produce habitat suitability maps to be combined into the tool. The fi nal stages of the project will be to assess and evaluate the tool, using real examples, and to investigate its further exploitation.

As far as LRCs are concerned, the major benefi t of the pro-ject will be the exploration of a new way of using their data, which will potentially be very important and will also mean that LRCs are asked to provide a new and valuable service to the planning and development sector. The LRCs who are supporting the project will receive maps back produced by the models, which will no doubt be of interest. They will also receive back single habitat layers where the project has had to produce these from the varied layers they submitted.

By the time of the ALERC conference in October, the project will have been completed and the results can be communi-cated. If you have any questions before then, please don’t hesitate to get in contact via [email protected].

News in brief

ANC – Post continuation

As you are hopefully aware, the ALERC National Coordina-tor post has been extended at least until the end of Septem-ber. Since the news was fi rst broken, the fl esh has been put on the bones of the work plan. The post is supported half by the NBNT and half by ALERC, and the work will refl ect this. Much of the work will be similar to the work carried out over the previous two years, including continuation of the advo-cacy role which ensures that all relevant consultations are responded to on behalf of ALERC and exploits opportunities to have input on documentation and future guidance.

Continuing another theme from the past two years will be working with LRCs to get the most out of the NBN Gateway. This will mean helping and encouraging LRCs to use web-services to access new data sets.

Support for the accreditation system as well as organisation

of the conference will continue. There is also a new element to the work; coordinating the LRC input into the biodiversity offsetting decision support tool feasibility study as discussed elsewhere in the newsletter.

Finally, a portion of time will be devoted to securing the continuation of the post beyond September by investigating new projects and potential new sources of funding.

Consultation responses

ALERC regularly consults with outside organisations on its members’ behalf and the last few weeks has seen a fl ur-ry of activity as three different organisations have received ALERC input.

GBIF

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) receives data from LRCs via the NBN Gateway. This is essentially a global version of the NBN Gateway, and based in Copenha-gen. They are considering making all data providers waive copyright over their data to reduce the vast array of licenc-es and conditions that data is currently published under on GBIF. In its response, ALERC has pointed out the commer-cial sensitivity of data and that if data providers have no control over who is using their data, then this threatens the supply of records to GBIF, or any portal for that matter.

Recorder 6

Many of you will have noticed the post on the NBN forum from Mary Campling of JNCC on the future of Recorder 6. JNCC no longer wish to support R6 in its current form and are exploring other online options. ALERC has replied to this, pointing out how valuable R6 is to most LRCs. There are also technical concerns over online databases, especial-ly as some people do not feel confi dent that their broadband connections are reliable enough to enable them to use an online database. One of the other major issues with moving away from R6 will be that LRCs would have to rewrite their

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2014 ALERC Conference

Will take place on Wednesday October 15th at the BVSC Birmingham.

reporting routines. ALERC will ask how JNCC envisage this being resourced.

This document is still in draft and currently being looked at by the ALERC data fl ow group.

BTO

The British Trust for Ornithology has consulted its members on a variety of issues and has extended the consultation to outside organisations. ALERC has supplied a response, which looks to build the relationship between BTO and LRCs.

For more information on these consultation responses visit the ALERC forum, and for the fi nal responses themselves, visit the website at http://www.alerc.org.uk/alerc-publica-tions--consultation-responses.html.

Accreditation

Kent and Medway BRC will be assessed shortly. There are several other LRCs who are currently working towards accreditation, so if you are interested in being accredited, please register your interest to ensure your assessment can take place in good time. The ALERC website has recent-ly been updated to include example documentation from accredited LRCs, so please visit the accreditation pages if you would like to see what the submissions from accredited LRCs look like.

Board Changes

Since the conference last year, there have been a couple of changes to the personnel on the ALERC board of directors. Aisling Carrick has stood down, but Steve Hannah from The Wildlife Information Centre for the Lothians and Borders and Mark Pollitt from Dumfries and Galloway Environmental Re-sources Centre have joined the board. For the full list of directors, please visit the website.

Happy Birthday ALERC

ALERC was incorporated on 2nd July 2009, meaning that on 2nd July 2014, it will be fi ve years old. If you have any stories relating to the events of the last fi ve years, e.g. something memorable from a conference, or a particularly interesting project you have worked on, then please send them in as they will make interesting material for the winter newsletter. Special thanks must go to the directors for the time they have put into ALERC, and for the members for allowing it to all happen. Your continued support is greatly valued.

Memberships Renewals Due

On the same theme, membership renewals are being sent out. If you haven’t received one, please get in touch. If you have any questions or comments on membership or ALERC it’s self, again, please don’t hesitate to get in contact.

Get the Picture

Tony Price - Somerset Environmental Records CentrePhotos courtsey of Mrs Elaine Hagget

All LRC’s must have oddities in their patch I guess. Last year I was contacted by someone who wanted to come and see a rare orchid. Now we were aware of its location. It had last been recorded in 2005 offi cially and photos are available on the web. The exact location is not and this prompted the interested party to contact us. As a result of their visit we have these images to show. As a bonus it now has a new name which we’re proud to say includes some Somerset botanists: Ophrys × pietzschii Kümpel ex F.J. Rumsey & H.J. Crouch.





NEYEDC forum for ecological consultants 29th April 2014“Funding models for Local Records Centres”

Mark Wills - North and East Yorkshire Ecological Data Centre

NEYEDC and CIEEM held a joint event in York to look at the ways Local Records Centres are funded and whether, in the light of cuts to Local Authority budgets, funding from the private sector can be raised to ensure the continued viability of LRCs.

The key issues raised during the discussions are summa-rised below:

• Consultants suggested that the increasing of fees by LRCs is likely to result in developers asking consult-ants to perform only a cursory desk study, to avoid the higher fees. CIEEM nationally expressed this view as well.

• The forum explored the possibility of added-value products to increase income or justify the increase in charges, but the discussion always returned to the cost of the service to the developer and their willing-ness to pay.

• Large-scale developments should be expected to con-tribute more than small-scale developments due to the budgets involved, however it would be very diffi cult to defi ne a metric which described the scale of develop-ment and could be used to differentiate between small scale developments and large scale development. It was felt this was beyond the scope of this meeting, but could be an area to explore further.

• The meeting discussed the level of drop-off in demand for searches at varying level of price increase. At the Full cost recovery rate (total cost approx. £400), it was estimated NEYEDC would lose 80% of its data search traffi c, thereby nullifying the effect of increasing the price.

Conclusions

• The viability of NEYEDC and other LRCs depended on charging an intermediate amount that maximised income, whilst balancing the ability to pay.

• LRCs could not recover the full cost of its data collec-tion and management operation from its data servic-es, whilst the willingness to pay of developers limits the amount LRCs can expect to charge.

• The meeting felt it would be useful for NEYEDC to hold an annual forum for its consultant clients. We agreed and this is something we will be doing.

The National Harvest Mouse Survey 2014 – Get Involved!

Charlie Durigan - Harvest Mouse Survey Co-ordinator, the Mammal Society

The tiny harvest mouse, weighing in at only 5-8g on average, claims the title of Britain’s smallest rodent. Its diminutive nature is one of the reasons that harvest mice are rarely seen, leading to questions on their current distribution and how common the species now is across the UK.

In order to build a better picture of where harvest mice can be found in mainland Britain, the Mammal Society is running a national survey of harvest mice over 2013 and 2014. Volunteer surveyors are asked to search for the distinctive woven nests that these mice build throughout summer and autumn.

The fi rst survey season has now ended, with eighty-fi ve surveys down and many more to go – but a good start has been made by volunteers searching for harvest mouse nests across England, Wales and southern Scotland. The stormy weather during December prevented many of the 200 or so registered surveyors from getting out to look for nests, but a big thank you is owed to all those who managed to squeeze in time to complete their surveys.

Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty provide good opportunities for surveyors to search for harvest mice as those managing the land in protected landscapes are often particularly encouraged to look after habitats for the benefi t of wildlife. Areas of long grass, reedbeds and the

Send your stories to [email protected]

Picture courtesy of BWC



unmown margins of fi elds or watercourses are favoured by harvest mice, but they can turn up in almost any patch of habitat with long stemmed grass-like vegetation that is connected to other similar habitat.

The Mammal Society is calling for more volunteers to get out into the countryside and suburbs looking for the woven nests of our tiniest British rodent. November and Decem-ber are the best times to look, when the vegetation that the nests are built within has died back and they become more visible (see picture below), and after harvest mice have fi nished breeding for the year. We have big gaps to be surveyed especially in the south western, central and more northern parts of England, in Wales and in southern Scotland – but wherever you live, we would like your help to build a better picture of the current distribution of this diminutive species.

Volunteers use the straightforward instructions provided by The Mammal Society to search for nests during Novem-ber or December, looking only once at each site surveyed. You don’t need to be an expert to get involved - wherever you live in England, Wales or southern Scotland, we need your help! The Mammal Society are also arranging some training sessions, which will be running later in the year for those who are interested, so keep an eye out.

The survey season is early winter, but you can contact The Mammal Society now to be given an area to survey. For details on how to take part, go to The Mammal Society website or get in touch using the details below:

http://www.mammal.org.uk/harvestmouse_survey

Email: [email protected]

Tel: 023 8023 7874

Use of Information from ALERC Members

Tom Hunt - ALERC National Coordinator

Last summer, ALERC members were asked to complete a survey on the website, which aimed to compile facts and fi gures on the LRCs of the country which in turn can be used to inform ALERC decisions and to make the case for LRCs.

Many thanks to everyone who completed the survey as the information provided has proved very useful for advo-cating LRCs and investigating their current position. The fi gures captured by the survey have been used in conjunc-tion with other statistics to make estimates on things such as the uptake of LRC enquiry services or the proportion of local authorities supporting their LRCs. The wide ranging nature of the survey, whilst taking time to complete, meant that a detailed set of data on ALERC members has been accumulated and can be referred to in order to answer questions on LRCs.

One of the major questions that people in LRCs up and down the country have asked themselves is “what propor-tion of planning applications do our data enquiries cover?” Indeed I asked this myself, whilst in a meeting with a lo-cal authority in Cheshire a few years ago. It was interest-ing to ask the LA reps how many planning applications they make decisions on per year, and then realising that although our enquiry service was growing, it was clearly still only being used for a tiny proportion of planning ap-plications. My estimate for this proportion at the time was somewhere between 1 and 10%.

Now, thanks to the data provided by the members and ac-cess to the DCLG planning fi gures for England, it is pos-sible to make a more educated estimate of the proportion of planning applications that receive LRC data in England. This is done by comparing the total number of planning applications in the areas covered by ALERC members in England with the total number of enquiries in this area. Since two members did not submit fi gures to the survey, the fi gure for the number of enquires has to be scaled up slightly, meaning that the resulting fi gures are an estimate and not exact.

So with this in mind, we can estimate that in 2012-13, 3.19% of all planning applications in England have an LRC enquiry associated with them. It has been commented that not all planning applications are likely to have an ef-fect on biodiversity, so we can remove some categories of application from the fi gures (a list of which categories were included and excluded can be supplied on demand). This increases the percentage to 10.22%. These calculations are useful in that they may give some indication of “market penetration” of LRC services and they will become even more interesting when we are able to compare the per-

Picture courtesy of Mike Brown, S.Wales Mammamal group

LRC Matter s Issue 3 July 2014


centage with that of 2013-14. However they are only one way of judging the effect of LRCs on biodiversity decision making, and should be used as any formal target.

A simpler statistic to calculate is the percentage engage-ment from local authorities. This can be calculated for the whole of the ALERC membership by dividing the total number of local authorities covered by an LRC, by the total number of LRC – LA agreements. This comes out at 70%. It doesn’t measure how much engagement each LA has with its LRC, i.e. the value of each agreement. However, it does show that, given the essential service that LRCs pro-vide, there is work to do make sure every local authority understands this.

One of the claims made by ALERC and LRCs, is that an in-vestment from local authorities, or anyone else in an LRC is actually augmented by the fact that LRCs can utilise volunteer effort. The fi gures collected by the survey with reference to volunteers can actually help try and quantify this effect. The total number of hours a week contributed to LRCs by offi ce volunteers is around 894, which scaled up would equate to a £293 000 contribution per year at minimum wage. This is of course a conservative estimate, since many or most volunteers, if they were paid, could command much more that minimum wage.

The examples quoted above provide just a snapshot of the kind of fi gures available through the ALERC survey, which are very useful for providing evidence when ALERC needs to make the case for LRCs. Good examples of such uses are the consultation responses that have recently been completed, where the total number of records held by LRCs as been quoted alongside fi gures for the number of LRCs using different database platforms in order to pro-vide powerful arguments on the future of biodiversity data sharing.

If you have a question you are interested in, which you think could be answered with this information please get in touch. LRCs are reminded that membership renewal forms will be sent our soon, and with these will come ques-tions that allow the information to be updated for 2013-14 so please look out for this.

Documents

Happy 5th Birthday ALERC!