The UK Biodiversity Research Advisory Group

The UK’s National Biodiversity Research Platform

UK BRAG exists to:

• Identify, promote and facilitate biodiversity research to support UK and individual country biodiversity action plan commitments¹;
• Coordinate effective and efficient UK engagement with European biodiversity research issues, fulfilling the role of a national biodiversity research platform;
• Contribute to effective biodiversity research networking in the UK, leading to increased interdisciplinary capacity;
• Support knowledge transfer activities in relation to biodiversity research.

BES - BRAG event 2009 focused on the NEA

The British Ecological Society (BES) Science Policy Team, and the UK Biodiversity Research Advisory Group (UK BRAG) held a joint workshop on Wednesday 9^th September, at the University of Hertfordshire de Havilland campus, looking at the development of the National Ecosystem Assessment (NEA).  The programme is available.

The NEA is intended to;

• provide a synthesis of the state of the natural environment and provision of ecosystem services, exploring future scenarios and possible policy responses;
• create a compelling and coherent narrative on both the state and value of natural environment and ecosystem services, to help raise awareness of their importance to human well-being and future economic prosperity;
• involve an inclusive process of interaction with stakeholders and communities of interest to interact and share learning, and in particular to foster better inter-disciplinary cooperation between natural and social scientists.

The session was an opportunity to look at how the NEA is operating and to feed into how the research community and policy makers would like to see it used. There were presentations and discussion from

11am – 12:30 pm, with lunch and networking for participants, followed by a breakout into discussion groups and a final report back from 1:30 pm – 3:30 pm. 

The workshop was to facilitate connections between those with an interest in biodiversity research and policy, and those involved in developing the NEA. A summary report of the session is available to download. If you have any problems with this or any other reports on the UK BRAG website, please 

See also the BES and NEA websites.

Latest publications:-

Report for 2007-2008

The last report covered the period 2003 - 2006. This report provides a summary of UK BRAG activity since then.  

Marine biodiversity and the provision of goods and services: identifying the research priorities.

Given the difficulties in sampling and understanding the processes occurring in the marine environment, comparatively little is known of how marine biodiversity contributes to the delivery of goods and services relied upon by people.

With this in mind a special sub group of the UK BRAG was convened to look at Marine biodiversity and the provision of goods and services. Their 2008 report is now available.

2008 Events: -

Workshop looking at "Mechanisms for filling knowledge gaps for Biodiversity Action Plan Species; held December 2008. Report now available.

On December 4^th and 5^th 2008, the Biodiversity Reporting and Information Group (BRIG), in conjunction with BRAG, jointly held a workshop. This invitation only event was to identify the key research and one-off survey signposting actions required to take forward the conservation of Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP) priority species.  Peak Ecology Ltd was commissioned to organise the workshop, which was managed by a Steering Group comprising Ant Maddock and Paul Rose (JNCC), in conjunction with Margaret Palmer (Wildlife and Countryside Link), and Deborah Long (Scottish Environment Link). This Steering Group represented the BRIG/BRAG research sub-group. The workshop was generously hosted by Natural England at their Peterborough offices. All the experts invited worked extremely hard to a very tight schedule to make the workshop the success that it was. The event fulfilled its aims of bringing together experts to endorse proposals for research and one-off survey actions for priority species, and to produce suites of actions that can be taken forward in a logical way.  The report of the workshop (462 Kb), should be read with the  accompanying appendix (1.5 Mb).

Special session at the BES annual meeting, 4th September 2008, London.

Following the success of UK BRAG's side event at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the British Ecological Society, the Group  once again joined forces with the BES to organise a special session on Ecosystem Services at the 2008 Annual Meeting at Imperial College, London.  The programme can be downloaded, along with a report of the special session. The speaker's slides can also be viewed by going to the links below.

Dr Peter Costigan (1.3 Mb)

Prof. Ed Maltby (1.9 Mb)

Prof. Roy Haines-Young & Dr Marion Potschin (please note this is a very large file of 9.3 Mb)

Dr Ruth Swetnam (please note the large file size - 4.05 Mb)

Prof.Alastair Fitter (2.15 Mb)

Prof. Andrew Watkinson (3.1 Mb)

Dr. Dan Osborn (0.3 Mb)

Dr. Peter Carey (3.0 Mb)

There was also a joint BES-BRAG event at the 2007 BES meeting in Glasgow. A brief summary of this event is available.

UK BRAG 3 Year Report

A summary of the important knowledge gaps, identified by the UK Biodiversity Advisory Group 2003-2006, 'Research Needs for UK Biodiversity', has now been published.  Hard copies are available from the UK BRAG Secretariat ( )

UK BRAG Leaflet

The UK BRAG Secretariat have produced a leaftet to summarise the role, activities and work of UK BRAG; the leaflet can be downloaded here.  Requests for hard copies should be made by email to

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