The winners and highly commended recipients of the NBN Awards for Wildlife Recording 2025 were announced at the SS Great Britain, in Bristol, on Thursday 20 November 2025.
These annual national Awards recognise and celebrate the outstanding contributions adults and young people are making to wildlife recording and data sharing, which is helping to improve our understanding of the UK’s biodiversity and assisting conservation efforts.
NBN Lifetime Achievement Award 2025
Winner
Dr Philip Smith is the winner of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award.
Philip has contributed at least 37,400 records to Merseyside BioBank. His main interest is coastal species, principally botany, terrestrial invertebrates and herptiles/amphibians. His extensive research on the Sefton Coast (for more than 50 years) makes it one of the most studied areas in the country.
He has written over 500 scientific reports, articles, papers and four books. His records and advice are included in the Local Nature Recovery Strategy, Liverpool City Region State of Nature Report and other Local Plans. His records are submitted to iRecord with most of them being on the NBN Atlas.
Highly commended
Our highly commended nominee is Jenny Mallinson.
Jenny has been recording wildlife for over 50 years and in that time has mentored and guided hundreds of people on their own recording journey. She records everything in and around the sea and coast but has a particular passion for and expertise in hydroids and marine non-natives; she has self-produced a guide to hydroid identification which links field recognition and laboratory identification. Her more recent records are submitted to iRecord (and thence to the NBN Atlas) while independent intertidal records are submitted to either iRecord or Seasearch as well as the Hampshire Biodiversity Information Centre. In 2024 she recorded the first sighting of the nudibranch Doris verrucosa in the Solent.
NBN Verifier’s Award 2025
Winner
Ashleigh Whiffin is the winner of the 2025 Verifier’s Award
Ashleigh covers a range of taxa with a particular focus on insects. Her records of lesser-known groups such as Orthoptera, Diptera and Trichoptera have filled recording gaps, particularly in Scotland. In 2016 she helped establish The Silphidae Recording Scheme. Since then, she has verified thousands of records on iRecord, doing so for several hours a week. Much of her free time is spent volunteering for insects and insect recording and sharing her enthusiasm with others.
Highly commended
Our highly commended nominee is Chris Du Feu.
Chris verifies the majority of records of terrestrial slugs for the Non-marine Mollusc Recording Scheme, run by the Conchological Society of Great Britain & Ireland. He does this for the whole of the UK and primarily via iRecord – including the thousands of records now coming from iNaturalist each year. He spends several days per month verifying records, on a wholly voluntary basis, and has dealt with roughly 5,000 records a year for over 5 years. Through his own initiative (although heartily endorsed by the Conchological Society) over many years he has given dozens of talks and slug identification training events for all kinds of audiences.
NBN Young Person’s Award 2025
Joint winners
We couldn’t separate our two finalists in this year’s Young Person’s category, so we have joint winners!
Henry Colnet (14 years old)
Henry has been volunteering for the Suffolk Wildlife Trust Youth Board for nearly three years. He is their youngest member and attends monthly meetings. Alongside this, he attends specially organised Youth Board events and promotes conservation and the importance of nature through these to the younger generation. Henry is actively involved in conservation projects at home and has helped plant 300 trees and 50m of native hedgerow, built bird boxes and planted wildflower strips. He also assists in bird ringing on behalf of the BTO.
Joe Carroll (17 years old)
Joe contributes regularly to national recording schemes including the Breeding Bird Survey and Wetland Bird Survey. He has also trained as a bird ringer, further enhancing the depth of his contributions by collecting detailed biological data on individual birds. He has spoken at conferences and events about his experiences as a young birder, offering an honest and relatable perspective that has helped others feel welcome and inspired. His talks have highlighted both the challenges and rewards of being a young person in the conservation sector, helping to break down barriers and encourage greater participation from a more diverse range of young people.
NBN Newcomer Award 2025
Winner
Elizabeth Beston is the winner of the 2025 NBN Newcomer Award.
Elizabeth started taking part in Seasearch surveys in 2018, quickly moving to specialise in the intertidal species found in Norfolk rockpools. Due to nearshore plankton being under-recorded in Norfolk (and around the country) she is providing the first long-term data set in this area. She started The Plankton Project CIC in January 2023 and data from March 2023 to December 2023 has now been added to the NBN Atlas. Her rather niche volunteer recording activity and her wonderfully-engaging supporting activities, to bring plankton and her findings to a wider audience, are quite unique.
Highly Commended
Our highly commended nominee is Janine Maree Finlay.
Janine has developed a local programme of biodiversity recording centred on Kinlochard in Stirlingshire. Since 2016, she has become a leading, place-based ecological recorder through a combination of personal passion, persistence and skill development. Largely self-taught and self-funded, alongside formal data submission, she organises local events to share sightings and raise awareness. She contributes an estimated 60+ volunteer hours per month to fieldwork, data logging, mentoring, and land stewardship activities.
NBN Award for Marine Wildlife Recording 2025
Winner
The winner of the NBN Award for Marine Wildlife Recording is Owen Paisley.
Owen played a key role in setting up Seasearch West and is its Scotland Coordinator. He is behind thousands of records covering a vast stretch of coast, focusing on habitats and species that are often overlooked or hard to reach—such as native oysters, eelgrass, maerl beds, and more recently, serpulid worm aggregations. All records are shared through the Seasearch database and passed on to the NBN Atlas, local records centres, and Marine Recorder. His fieldwork has contributed to several key projects, such as the Colonsay expedition, part of the Better Biodiversity Data project, which added over 150 species records.
Highly Commended
Our highly commended nominee is Katie Dyke.
Katie is a Whale and Dolphin Conservation’s Shorewatch coordinator, overseeing a network of trained volunteers who carry out regular land-based surveys across Scotland. She has personally conducted over 800 Shorewatch surveys and with her support, citizen scientist volunteers have logged over 113,000 Shorewatch surveys – more than 1 million minutes of effort! She has played a transformative role in building a vibrant, inclusive community of volunteers through the Shorewatch programme and has trained over 1,000 volunteers. Through outreach and events, it’s estimated that she has personally engaged at least 15,000 people.
NBN Award for Terrestrial Wildlife Recording 2025
Winner
The winner of the NBN Award for Terrestrial Wildlife Recording is Dylan Peters.
As a young recorder of plants, lower plants, invertebrates and birds, Dylan is highly regarded as an expert of botany and is becoming a national expert on difficult taxa such as dandelions and brambles. He is extraordinary as a verifier and shares his data with the Bristol Regional Environmental Records Centre where he is also a volunteer entering records, verifying and validating identifications and writing articles. He has great knowledge of species in their ecological context and has provided management advice to Bristol Council to help safeguard rare plants. He has also created his own website to share his knowledge – WildBristol.uk
Highly Commended
Our highly commended nominee is Ben Greig.
Ben keeps meticulous records, including moths, butterflies and bees which have shed light on previously undocumented species in Coton Orchard in Cambridgeshire. Notably, he discovered the rare Dark Crimson Underwing moth, a find so remarkable it was featured in The Guardian. He shares his data with local organisations and openly via iRecord. A self-taught naturalist, he dedicates countless volunteer hours each month to monitoring Coton Orchard’s biodiversity as well as many other places in Cambridgeshire.
NBN Group Award 2025
Winner
The winner of the NBN Group Award 2025 is The Joint Derbyshire Moth Verification and Recording Team.
The group was formed towards the end of 2023 following the death of the County Recorder in 2022. This left a huge void and a loss of expertise and several years of backlog. The group consists of 10 members chosen because of their own particular skills, expertise and standing within the mothing community in Derbyshire. The development of a team of experts is unique in the county, and possibly the country and reduces the burden on any one person. It has verified over 155,000 individual records in just 14 months. There have been many new discoveries in locations and distributions and the impact of bringing records up-to-date has meant that there have been 14 new micro species, and 5 new macro species added to the county list. The main output of the group so far has been the publication of the 2019-23 Macro Moth Report for Derbyshire.
Highly Commended
Our highly commended nominee is The National Hedgehog Monitoring Programme.
The National Hedgehog Monitoring Programme fills a critical gap in UK mammal monitoring by generating population density estimates, rather than just presence/absence or distribution data, for hedgehogs and co-occurring species. Over 300 volunteers have attended in-person training since the project began in 2023. In addition, over 3,000 individuals have participated remotely by classifying wildlife images on MammalWeb, the primary data portal. The programme is having a significant impact by connecting people with nature has already inspired the formation of new community groups, strengthened local networks, and helped people feel that they are contributing to something meaningful and national in scale.
NBN Awards for Wildlife Recording Sponsors
As always, we are very grateful to the following organisations who are supporting the NBN Awards for Wildlife Recording 2025 with their sponsorship: RSPB, Opticron, Habitat Aid, Field Studies Council (FSC), William Collins, British Wildlife Magazine and NHBS.
John Sawyer NBN Open Data Award 2025
This Award is given to a member of the National Biodiversity Network Trust who is making a valuable contribution to open biodiversity data in the UK, and helping achieve the NBN Trust’s mission of “making data work for nature”.
Winner
Greenspace Information for Greater London CIC (GiGL)
This year’s winner – Greenspace Information for Greater London CIC (GiGL) – is a local environmental records centre that shares over 100,000 records on the NBN Atlas for more than 1,600 taxa.
- 100% of their records have verified identifications.
- 81% are shared under an Open licence with a resolution of 100m or higher.
- Some records date back to the 1500s!
- In 2024, 1.4 million records were downloaded from their data resources.