• advise Government  on the development and implementation of policies for, or affecting, nature conservation in the UK and internationally;
• provide advice and disseminate knowledge on nature conservation issues affecting the UK and internationally;
• establish common standards throughout the UK for nature conservation, including monitoring, research, and the analysis of results;
• commission or support research which it deems relevant to these functions.

 

The Biological Records Centre (BRC), established in 1964, is the national focus in the UK for terrestrial and freshwater species recording (other than birds). It works with the voluntary recording community throughout Britain and Ireland. The BRC database contains about 13.5 million records of more than 12000 species.

 

BRC is funded jointly by JNCC and NERC through a partnership based on a Memorandum of Agreement (MoA).  The partnership started in 1973 when the Nature Conservancy was divided to form the successor bodies Nature Conservancy Council (NCC) and Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (ITE).  NCC was in turn divided further to form JNCC, while ITE was merged with other NERC units to form CEH.  Through all these changes, the partnership has been maintained.  This report covers the period of the 6-year MoA for 1999-2004.  At the time of writing, a new agreement for 2005-2010 is in place.

 

The period 1999-2004 was marked by rapid progress in information technology, with concomitant institutional developments.  These have been highly beneficial for BRC, whose data are increasingly used, not only by the UK country conservation agencies but also by NGOs, research workers, policy makers and volunteers.

 

The outstanding achievement of the reporting period, underpinning most other developments, was the setting up of the National Biodiversity Network (NBN).  This has transformed the way in which BRC works, not only by providing access to data through the NBN Gateway, but by bringing together providers and users of data in a way that was not hitherto possible.  The resulting pattern of data flow is now quite complicated (Fig. 1 in the report).

 

Most of the data held by BRC are provided by specialist National Schemes and Societies (NSS), which not only collect data from volunteers, but raise standards of recording and, increasingly, maintain their own databases. Through these societies, the level of expertise in recording many groups has increased steadily, so that for biological recording, the early 21st century appears to be a golden age. Admittedly, museums and especially universities are generally less active in recording.  Therefore, the future depends critically on volunteers and NSS. BRC, working in collaboration with the National Biodiversity Network (NBN), provides essential underpinning for NSS, notably through its contribution to the Networking Naturalists project of NBN. For taxonomic groups that lack an active society, e.g. fleas, BRC works directly with individual data holders, and helps them to bring their work to fruition.

 

Biodiversity data are valuable to society only if they can be used to understand and manage the environment. Although data capture and collation were the priority in the first thirty years of BRC's existence, the interpretation of change is now almost equally important. For some purposes, such as inferring the climatic tolerances of species, rather crude data may suffice. For many others, it is essential to understand how records were compiled, and in particular how data may be biased by bursts of recording in particular areas. People not involved with recording schemes commonly imagine that data flow in at a steady rate. This is never the case. Most data capture is through recording projects, which collect data, validate them and then archive them. Results are interpreted by linking occurrence data to historical information, taxonomic databases and so forth, as well as by compiling information on species attributes.