Power to the people and getting the best value from public money

I attended the excellent launch of the Wildlife and Countryside Link visions for food and farming and for water today.

Secretary of State, Liz Truss, offered a response and I was again struck by the emphasis that she placed on data and the importance of volunteers to both collect the data and be empowered it use it to act for conservation.

We are a nation of naturalists and we should be proud of the quality of the datasets that allow us to report on the state of nature.  This is the information that allows us to detect changes in the natural world, uncover problems and begin to put in place the right responses.

Yet, as I reported in a previous blog (see here) I remain worried that the current round of spending cuts may threaten the very system that delivers so much.

The monitoring of the UK’s wildlife covers a wide range of taxa, some through the compilation of species records from a variety of sources such as local studies and unstructured ‘ad-hoc’ recording, and others through more structured schemes, such as the BTO/JNCC/RSPB Breeding Bird Survey which uses a robust sampling design and rigorous survey methodology. What these schemes have in common is that they rely on the efforts of a great number of enthusiastic and dedicated volunteer surveyors, who give their time and expertise freely. In 2014, for example, volunteers made over seven thousand visits to BBS squares, and nearly two thousand visits to squares in the Wider Countryside Butterfly Survey.

The figure below, courtesy of the JNCC, shows the annual costs some of the major wildlife monitoring schemes, funded by partnerships between Government (JNCC and the four national statutory conservation agencies) and NGOs. These NGOs include many of the State of Nature partners, including the RSPB, the British Trust for Ornithology, Butterfly Conservation, the Botanical Society of the British Isles and others.

Yet, it would be wrong to think that this voluntary effort organises itself.  Most schemes rely on some funding from government which, coupled with charity investment, provides the infrastructure to support and mobilise volunteers to collect data.

Whilst the financial investment in these schemes by Governmental and NGO partners is not insubstantial, the graph makes it clear that this is dwarfed by the value of the volunteer contribution. Whilst the values shown might not be exactly right – these are based on estimates of volunteer effort – the general pattern is certainly true. The value of this volunteer effort very likely runs into eight figures; without the contribution of these volunteers this monitoring, and the conservation action it enables, would simply not be possible. However, without the scheme design, coordination, data collation, analysis and reporting enabled by the Governmental and NGO funding, the massive value of the volunteer effort would not be realised.

I hope that the Secretary of State’s passion for data comes through in her conversations with the Treasury over the spending review and she is able to protect investment in these schemes.

Notes:

Estimates of volunteer contribution are standardised using Heritage Lottery funding volunteer rates. They are very conservative (they exclude the additional value provided by volunteers leading workshops, entering data, undertaking internships, funding their own travel etc.) with a high degree of uncertainty. The exact value of NBN volunteer contribution is unquantified (known 4.5million submissions per year) – the value will be off the scale.

Note that BRAIn (Biological Recording Analysis and Interpretation) recording only includes volunteer contributions from those volunteers organising the 85 schemes. BRAIn recording effort is included in NBN.

The volunteer return (not including the value of NBN records recorded from BRAIn schemes and from ad hoc NBN records) is a minimum of 3.7 times the total investment from Government and NGO sources, and around 7 times the Government investment.