Monitoring and Data

The actions that we take to protect biodiversity in Scotland are informed by access to good quality biological information that is collected in the same way over a number of years. This data is invaluable in ensuring we and others take informed decisions to protect Scotland's biodiversity

Monitoring

In order to fully understand the effectiveness of our actions for habitats and species conservation in Scotland we need to monitor change over time. There are many monitoring programmes run and supported by member organisation of the Scottish Biodiversity Forum; these programmes are able to identify changes in distribution and population sizes for species and extent and quality for habitats. This information can help us to identify the status and trend of changes within species and habitats and inform our priorities for action and our management decisions.

Data

In Scotland we have a long history of gathering natural science data with many specialist societies having very long records of species occurrence data. Gathering, storage and access to high quality biological data is incredibly important if we are to ensure decision makers, such as planners, are fully informed. With a clear need to collate and visually display this increasing volume of biological data the National Biodiversity Network  (NBN) was established in 2000; providing a repository for biological data across the UK. With over 67 Million species records and many tools enabling the visual display of biological data the NBN is now the main focus of biological data storage in the UK.