Written by John Sawyer, CEO, NBN Trust
j.sawyer@nbn.org.uk
“Facts are like people: they may be dull as individuals but they become interesting when you can look at a long procession of them and compare one with another” Aldo Leopold in Farm Phenology – A New Sport.
Biodiversity data management is a house divided. That is clear from our review of the data holdings on the NBN Gateway (see the Data Deficit article). Despite the excitement of reaching the extraordinary milestone of 100 million observations on the NBN Gateway it is tempered by news of our deficiencies. While Aldo Leopold was excited by the prospect of a long procession of facts it is clear that our work in the UK is not done, and that we are not allowing the full potential of our facts to be realised.
From an NBN viewpoint, for the majority of species in the UK we know little or nothing, we know less about ecosystems, habitats and communities. That which we do know about species is largely blurred to be unusable, even for that priority group of species known as invasive non-natives. There are also many holes in our national network that we need to plug. I expect that the amount of biodiversity data held outside of the NBN is at least three times the amount we currently have online. There are good reasons for a lot of these issues but that does not mean we have to retain the inertia.
That we need to thrash out our differences is clear and the opportunity to do just that presents itself in the very near future. The NBN Trust is currently seeking your views on the challenges faced by us all as a collaborative network which is the NBN. We have already heard your thoughts in response to our questionnaire (more than 200 submissions) and for that we are very grateful. The results will be published in the next two weeks. But we now have a series of strategy workshops that I hope you will attend. These will be an opportunity to air, discuss and solve the problems we face. They will be an opportunity to learn from, and about, each other and gain respect for your fellow NBN members.
Caring for biodiversity and its data in a crowded country is already challenging enough, so I hope you will bring bright and open, solutions-focussed minds to the forthcoming workshops. In doing that we can build a strategy that will be worthy of our collective efforts over the coming years.
