NBN Awards for Wildlife Recording

The National Biodiversity Network Trust wants to recognise significant achievement and celebrate success in wildlife recording and information sharing in the UK.

So, to do this, the NBN Trust set up a national award scheme, in 2015, in partnership with the Biological Records Centre and the National Forum for Biological Recording. These awards are made annually to individuals, groups of people or to whole organisations that are making outstanding contributions to wildlife recording and improving our understanding of the natural world in the UK.

Improving the NBN Awards for Wildlife Recording

The NBN Trust has been running the annual NBN Awards for Wildlife Recording for eight years. During that time we have celebrated the work and achievements of over 65 biological recorders! Before we launched the 2023 Awards’ scheme with the same format as previously, we thought it was time for a thorough review to see how we might be able to make them even better. 

As a result, we engaged in an in-depth market research exercise at the beginning of 2023 with NBN Trust members, Network News subscribers and former NBN Award nominators as well as with Award recipients.  We are very grateful for the participation and valuable feedback from all those who took part in this review. 

The main findings and suggestions from the review were: 

  • to change the nomination period – to January to March – instead of May to July, in order to avoid ecologists’ busy field-season 
  • to review the current NBN Award categories 
  • to simplify the nomination process further 
  • to publicise the NBN Awards more widely. 

In order to make the suggested improvements we will not run the NBN Awards in 2023 and will instead launch the revamped NBN Awards for nominations in January 2024. 

Previous Years’ Awards

2022 Awards

Information on all of the 2022 winners can be found in our previous news article.

2021 Awards

Information on all of the 2021 winners can be found in our previous news article.

2020 Awards

Information on all of the 2020 winners can be found in our previous news article.

2019 Awards

Information on all of the 2019 winners can be found in our previous news article.

2018 Awards

Information on all of the 2018 winners can be found in our previous news article.

2017 Awards

Information on all of the 2017 winners can be found in our previous news article.

2016 Awards

Information on all of the 2016 winners can be found in our previous news article.

2015 Awards

Information on all of the 2015 winners can be found in our previous news article.

John Sawyer NBN Open Data Award 

This award recognises and celebrates the outstanding contribution of NBN Data Partners in achieving the NBN Trust mission of “making data work for nature”. 

The NBN Trust will identify one data partner deserving of the John Sawyer NBN Open Data Award each year. 

To be considered, the data partner must: 

  1. Be a NBN Trust member 

  2. Have more than 500 records on the NBN Atlas

  3. Have updated at least one dataset that contains open licensed records during the year (Open licences are CC0, CC-BY and OGL)

The scoring will be calculated as follows: 

Criteria

Score

Currency

81-100% recorded within last 5 years 

5

51-80% recorded within last 5 years 

3

0-50% recorded within last 5 years 

1

Resolution

81-100% 100m resolution

5

51-80% 100m resolution

3

0-50% 100m resolution

1

Open licence

81-100% records on an Open licence

5

51-80% records on an Open licence

3

0-50% records on an Open licence

1

N.B. Previous winners of the award cannot win again within ten years.

N.B. Nominations cannot be made for the John Sawyer NBN Open Data Award.  

The winner of the Award will be notified by the end of October and invited to attend the Awards ceremony in November.