Day To Day Uses of Species Records in the Environment Agency

The Environment Agency (EA)help people and wildlife adapt to climate change and reduce its impacts, including flooding, drought, sea level rise and coastal erosion. Local Biodiversity Data is essential for the EA to undertake its work and this presentation will illustrate 10 routine uses of species records in operational activities of the Environment Agency.

Marina Flamank is National Biodiversity Advisor for the Business and Professional Development Team (Agriculture, Fisheries and the Natural Environment) at the Environment Agency with responsibility to pull together information on wildlife sites and protected species for ‘Easimap’ and the National Permit Screening tool.

Q&A with Marina Flamank

Does the Environment Agency share the species data that it generates with LERCs?
Environment Agency data is all publicly available through the NBN Atlas with no restrictions on how it can be used. As a government agency, our work is funded by the taxpayer. To access this data, simply visit the NBN Atlas Environment Agency page.
Is the species data that the EA use simple presence/absence data or does it have additional attributes?
The data does have additional attributes, but it’s not as well structured as I would like. The data that we use is gathered from many different sources and these can be very variable between datasets, so many attributes are lumped together under the attribute ‘sighting’ so that I can use these many records as a single layer. If we wanted to look at specific information in the ‘sighting’ attribute, it is there but not in a manner where it is easily searchable at a national database level.
Would it speed up the analysis of the data by the EA if they could have access to live datasets rather than holding an offline copy?
We don’t do a lot of analysis on the data. We don’t have the capacity or budget to undertake analysis of the data. We use the data to produce the map layer that we need for our work and we have to hold an offline copy of the data due to the way this is set up.