Guidelines and Best Practice

The formation of the Tracking Mammals Partnership has brought together the expertise of many different organisations and enabled discussion to take place on some important issues, including standardisation of survey methods, volunteer engagement, volunteer health and safety, improving survey coverage across the UK and the use of statistical techniques to analyse surveillance data. Workshops have been held to examine these areas in more detail and best practice guidelines and recommendations have been produced as a result.

Guidelines on best practice in surveillance and monitoring

Mammal surveys are often carried out in particular areas of the UK, with a variety of objectives, using different methods and timescales and operating at different geographical scales. Many surveys are also carried out locally level and look at presence, or population size, of a species in a given area at a particular point in time. The consequent differences in survey design mean that survey results cannot be compared very easily between regions, countries and species and, hence, opportunities to set the results in a wider context have been lost.

The TMP has recognised that an important part of co-ordinating a UK wide surveillance and monitoring programme for mammals involves standardising, where possible, the methods used and data collection and management, and has developed a set of guidelines for designing surveillance schemes.

Engaging with volunteers and managing volunteer networks

Most surveys operating within the TMP engage volunteers to collect the data, although some surveys use professional surveyors and in others a combination of volunteers and professionals has been found to be the best solution. The organisations in the TMP decided when setting up the Surveillance and Monitoring Programme that, generally, using volunteers was the best way to obtain the quantity of data required, sufficient sample sizes, and to obtain the best coverage across the UK. There are, however, some problems in engaging volunteers to do survey work, including their recruitment, providing adequate training and maintaining their interest over a period of time, at best many years if good survey results are to be obtained. The increasing emphasis on volunteer health and safety is also an important consideration. Following a workshop, TMP and the NBN Trust have jointly produced a best practice manual on engaging with volunteers and managing volunteer networks, which can be downloaded from this website.

Improving survey coverage across the UK

The majority of existing surveys are providing good data at a UK level, or for species with restricted distributions, at the appropriate country level. However, survey coverage in Scotland, Wales and particularly Northern Ireland is quite poor and population trend analysis at a regional level in England is only possible at present for a very limited number of widespread and common species. The TMP and the Environment and Heritage Service held a workshop in Northern Ireland to discuss some of the issues that were contributing to low volunteer participation and several recommendations were made as a result.

Statistical analysis methods for surveillance schemes

The Tracking Mammals Partnership (TMP) consists of 25 organisations with an interest in carrying out surveillance on mammals to assess population and distribution change over time. The first TMP report, published in March 2005, provided an overview of the work of the Partnership, but also highlighted some problems associated with attempting to make meaningful comparisons of results across surveys that use different data collection and analysis methods.

There are many advantages in having a diverse approach to mammal surveillance and it is not envisaged as being practical, realistic or even desirable to unify all the schemes and have one survey method or overarching survey for mammals. However, one way of producing better surveillance information is to standardise,where possible, the approach to statistical analysis of data and share best practice and statistical expertise. A statistics workshop (workshop record, mammal analyses, combining datasets, outliers) was held to look at these issues and to facilitate exchange of ideas and information between statisticians.