After my retiral at the end of last month from Scottish Natural Heritage, one of the main funders of the NBN, I was invited to reflect on my six years as an NBN trustee. I think we achieved a great deal during that period, but inevitably, a great deal more needs to be done to deliver the original vision of the NBN.
My first real ‘brush’ with the NBN was to help organise its launch in Scotland in 2002. The event took place in the august surroundings of the Royal Society in Edinburgh. The Environment Minister of the day agreed to address the meeting and I was asked to draft his speech. I duly delivered the text to the Scottish Executive. It included some high flown rhetoric about the NBN being the place where all biodiversity data will, in future, reside. I envisaged a day when everyone would use this database as the starting point and all that would be at issue, at public inquiries and the like, would be the interpretation of the agreed dataset. Things haven’t quite worked out that way, but the vision, or at least my version of it, remains. The day was memorable for me, as it was my first meeting with Sir John Burnett, the NBN’s first chair of Trustees. I was struck by his effortless charm and the wisdom of his contributions to the day’s proceedings.
My first Trustees meeting took place in early 2006. I think it was also Sir Neil Chalmers’ first meeting as chair. Much of that meeting was taken up with discussions about finance and the NBN fairly precarious position in that regard. Little changed throughout my six year stint on the board as it was a subject that we returned to on many occasions. It was made clear from that first meeting that we were not at the table to push personal agendas or peddle indulgences; our first, last and only concern must be what is best for the NBN as a whole.
At its best, the NBN is like a well-oiled machine. Although it is a complex community of interests, at its simplest, it consists of a series of inputs and outputs with quality control checks and balances deployed to ensure an overall consistency of approach. At the input end of the process is the army of observers and recorders who are out in the field in fair weather and foul making observations about their natural world. In my book, they are the heroes of the piece, doing what they love, and for the most part adding their records to the growing pool of data that the NBN has accumulated. This is achieved through the network of local record centres and/or the many schemes and societies that do such an essential job in championing particular groups and taxas. This is a selfless act, but there is also a growing recognition that knowing where our rarities and also the more run-of-the-mill plants and animals are located is an essential first stage in their effective conservation. Going, but perhaps not completely gone, are the days when record cards are piled under the bed and not shared with the wider world.
The outputs from the NBN are the ways in which the records are used for public good. These data can be deployed in dealing with matters at an international, national, regional or local level. Effective conservation of plants and animals is largely about managing land use effectively and making sure the conservationists’ voices are heard and acted upon. An evidence-based system of verifiable observations is one of the crucial contributions that organisations like SNH can make to the development control process. Our knowledge of the world around us is gleaned from the research we commission, undertake at our own hand or is shared by others who work in academia or other public environmental agencies. But we also rely on the data and information that from the voluntary sector, increasingly delivered through the NBN. Without this basic data on species distribution, our comment on development applications will necessarily be vague and without focus.
But the process is not without it tensions and inefficiencies. I recall on one occasion, a data flow model was presented to the Trustees for comment. It was tabled, rather than pre-circulated. These meetings were, in my experience, not known for their hilarity, but I laughed out loud when I received my copy. Arrows representing data flows from the point of collection, through storage and subsequent use, ran hither and yon – in fact one ran round in a perfect circle! In the subsequent discussion, we all seemed to accept the apparent complexity of it all. This agenda item demonstrated that the inter-relationships between the component parts of the NBN alliance were, in certain circumstances, labyrinthine and I think unnecessarily and unhelpfully so. There remains an opportunity for this complexity to be streamlined.
One of the joints that creaked the most in the NBN machine was the place of the local record centres. The aspiration for the NBN to be a single data repository that everyone could draw upon was an endpoint that created difficulty for some LERCs. Wasn’t that their job in their local area? For many, it cut across their business model. I think there is still also some unfinished business here.
I welcomed Sir Neil’s hand on the NBN tiller. He shared my desire to ‘put the NBN to work’; in other words to demonstrate that this collection of (now) 74 million (and rising) plant and animal sightings could help us to make better decisions about the environment and also to understand how the world around us is changing. A great deal of public money has been spent on this enterprise and, in return, it needs to show a demonstrable public benefit. The NBN’s ten year strategy produced in 2010 was predicated on the assumption of delivering public benefits and I wish them well in this vital enterprise.
One of the major contributions that SNH made during my time at the Trustees’ table was to support a wide range of schemes and societies in adding their records (past, present and future) to the NBN. RSPB and the Scottish Ornithologists Club were two of the biggest tickets that we supported financially. Between them, many tens of thousands of records were added as a direct result of SNH support. But working with the Highland Biological Recording Group gave me most joy. Murdo MacDonald, Ro Scott and the rest of the HBRG crew are an assorted group of knowledgeable professionals and enthusiasts who live and work in the most beautiful, but under-recorded, parts of Britain. They took to the NBN concept extremely easily and, over a period of years, have added a huge number of records across the taxonomic range. SNH’s financial support was modest, but vital to their record mobilisation effort. I salute you and ‘lang may your lumb reek’ (as we occasionally say in Scotland)!
And what of the future? I hope that very soon we raise our eyes from the dots on the map of individual species sightings to presenting habitat maps. This has been on the NBN’s radar for many years now and some steps have been made in this direction. But it is such an important building block of the biodiversity story that it cannot wait much longer. SNH is making bold strides in this direction and I hope that a concerted effort across all three countries will soon deliver a joined-up product.
On a personal level, my thanks are due to Jim Munford for his perseverance in pushing the NBN vision forward and particularly to Geoff Johnson, who I worked with at SNH and then in his role as NBN business analyst. And finally to Sir Neil Chalmers who chaired the meetings with such courtesy and efficiency.
Thank you all.
Alan McKirdy