The protection and conservation of UK wildlife and natural
features needs to be supported with good information on the state
of wildlife by which:
- priorities can be set
- actions can be defined
- the success of actions can be determined.
Wildlife statistics are brought together by this web service
to provide a vital and substantial component of the evidence
required to support conservation. They support JNCC, and others, in
developing an understanding of the state of UK nature, the
changes it is undergoing and the causes of these changes. JNCC has
traditionally produced a variety of publications and papers on the
state and trends of particular elements of biodiversity (birds,
mammals, higher plants etc) but until now has not considered trying
to produce any kind of overview of UK biodiversity.
This web service is a collation of statistics and trends
in UK species resulting from organised
surveillance
schemes and more general biological recording. The project attempts
to classify trends into "
increasing" (showing a
rate of increase in abundance or range at least equivalent to a 25%
increase over 25 years), "
declining" (showing a
rate of decrease in abundance or range at least
equivalent to a 25% decrease over 25 years) or
"
stable" (rate of increase or decrease less than
these values). There is insufficient information to make
these judgements for some of the species that have been
analysed.
This wildlife statistics web service attempts to present the
statistics in ways that are directly relevant to government policy
and decision making. Launched in June 2006, it is expected to
develop rapidly in terms of both content and service for a number
of years thereafter.
For more information about the ways in which the site can be
used and some warnings about the interpretation of the statistics
please refer to the section on
'Using the site'.
Four main levels of access to the statistics are currently
offered by the site:
- Interrogation and download of statistics
- High Level Summary Reports of the
statistics
- Search by species or habitat.
- Contributing sources of data
The following table shows the total numbers of datasets,
the number of organisations that provided them, the number of
statistics and trends currently included in the collation and the
total number of different taxa they cover.