Surveillance and monitoring
What do we mean by Surveillance? The word
‘surveillance’ originates from the French to ‘watch over’, and may
be used interchangeably with ‘monitoring’. Both imply repeated
recording over time. ‘Sampling’, ‘recording’ and ‘observation’ may
be one-off events, or form part of a surveillance or monitoring
scheme. Our strategy encompasses all these activities, however
defined, that help to reveal the state of biodiversity.
In the UK a wide range of surveillance and monitoring work is
undertaken, covering many terrestrial, freshwater and marine
species and habitats. The overall purpose of surveillance is
to help determine if nature conservation goals are being met, or if
not, to help identify problems that need to be
addressed.
Surveillance schemes undertake measurements annually or
periodically, which, when processed, provide trends in population,
distribution, habitat extent or condition and ecosystem function.
They report at a UK scale and also, in some cases, national,
regional, and major ecosystem scales. JNCC spends over £1
million a year on biodiversity surveillance and mostly delivers its
contribution through long term partnerships. Volunteers carry out most of
the fieldwork and recording for biodiversity surveillance in the
UK. We greatly appreciate their skills as well as their
dedication and we thank them for their tremendous contributions
over many years.
Surveillance Strategy
JNCC has developed The UK Terrestrial
Biodiversity Surveillance Strategy as a tool for
analysing and assessing data needs and comparing these against
current surveillance
coverage. The strategy identifies gaps and
overlaps in the coverage of surveillance schemes in order to enable
surveillance in the UK to become more useful and efficient in the
future. We need surveillance and monitoring schemes to
show us a clear picture of biodiversity in the UK and to answer
policy questions such as what are the environmental
pressures affecting species. The strategy will also
provide an important mechanism to pull together all relevant
information on biodiversity-related surveillance for input into the
Environmental Observation Framework (UK-EOF), which
is working on a complete framework for all environmental
observation and monitoring. For more information, download a
leaflet summarising the purpose and functioning
of the strategy, and visit the Surveillance
Strategy webpages on this site.
Schemes and Results
A database allowing you to search the results
from the UK surveillance and monitoring schemes is available
in the Schemes and results section of the website.
A summary of the results for each taxonomic group
is also provided. Further analysis of the results can be
found under Analysis and trends.
Protected Sites and Monitoring
JNCC has developed common standards for protected
sites monitoring, and the results at a UK
level are available.
