South Wales Otter Trust

South Wales Otter Trust is based in Abergavenny, Wales.

What excites the group about recording wildlife and what motivates them to get involved?

Originally it was mainly covering south Wales, but we have grown to cover all of Wales now, started 7 years ago, with the aim of “Realtime” monitoring of otters, through citizen science, how it works..

-We provide training for members of the public, on basic otter signs, spraint (poo), footprints, jelly, feeding remains etc

-Volunteers are then given a local patch to them to monitor (we try and cut down our carbon footprint, by keeping it local) and we encourage them to survey their patch once a month, this can be part of a walk, with family, friends or a dog walk (on public footpaths)

-We provide trained volunteers with a ArcGIS app, that they can add to their phone home screen, and when they are on a survey and find a otter sign, they can open the app, record the sign and submit, takes seconds, as soon as they have submitted it instantly apears on our data base (automatically recording their location and sign) link to the app below, have a look, but please don’t submit anything

-The app also records negatives, so if they have completed their survey and found nothing, they can simply record “NO” to the have you found a otter sign, this then shows up on our interactive map of records as blue-as far as we know, we are the only ones that record otter absence

-We have trained around 600 volunteer surveyors so far!

-Thousands of records have been submitted to local environmental record centres

“We monitor Otter presence/absence across Wales for their conservation, but this is also about getting outside, mental health and wellbeing, and exercise! As far as we know, this is the only module of combining citizen science, conservation, and using the latest ArcGIS technology , foe a species monitoring programme”

We are seeking funding to move our programme into Mid and North Wales, hopefully setting up satellite training centres for volunteers

You can find out more about the group on: