Biodiversity monitoring in the UK is undertaken through a wide range of activities, including ecological consultancy, academic research, and citizen science initiatives. Together, these approaches generate an extraordinary volume and diversity of data, underpinning our understanding of ecological patterns, trends, and change. However, these data streams are often designed to meet specific objectives and operate largely in parallel. As a result, opportunities are frequently missed to connect effort, reduce duplication, and build a more coherent evidence base that could better support policy development, conservation planning, and emerging areas such as nature finance and early warning systems.
This event builds on a presentation delivered for CIEEM in November 2025, which explored the complementary strengths of different biodiversity data sources. Consultancy data commonly focuses on habitat condition, species presence, and the outcomes of management or development interventions. Citizen science programmes generate large volumes of species observations across wide spatial and temporal scales, making them particularly valuable for detecting trends. Academic research, meanwhile, is typically designed to answer specific ecological questions and advance methodological and conceptual understanding. Each approach has clear strengths and limitations, but taken together they offer considerable scope to strengthen the UK’s biodiversity evidence base.
The session will open with a short refresher presentation, revisiting key messages and presenting examples of how data from professional practice, research, and citizen science can be brought together to enhance ecological evidence and decision‑making. Drawing on UK case studies and existing initiatives, the presentation will highlight both current progress and the practical challenges associated with combining datasets collected for different purposes, using different methods, and managed through different pipelines.
The main focus of the event will then shift to discussion and collective reflection. Participants will be invited to explore a central question: how can existing and emerging efforts to bring UK biodiversity data together be strengthened, better aligned, or accelerated in a practical and inclusive way? This will include discussion of issues such as data standards and interoperability, incentives and barriers to data sharing, alignment between national and local monitoring, and the role of existing infrastructure.
Rather than seeking a single solution, the discussion will aim to identify constructive next steps that build on what is already underway. These may include clarifying shared priorities, identifying areas where greater coordination or standardisation would add the most value, or exploring how collaboration between sectors could more effectively support policy, practice, and investment decisions. The session will also consider the different roles that consultants, researchers, citizen scientists, data custodians, and professional bodies can realistically play in moving this work forward.
This event is intended for practitioners, researchers, data managers, and anyone involved in UK biodiversity monitoring who is interested in maximising the collective value of biodiversity data. By bringing diverse perspectives into the same conversation, the session aims to support constructive progress towards a more joined‑up, resilient, and usable biodiversity evidence base for the UK.
Catherine Burton is a Chartered Ecologist with around 30 years’ experience working across academia, consultancy, LERCs, and government. She currently works at JNCC as an Evidence Specialist. Her experience of both biodiversity data collection and evidence analysis has driven a long‑standing interest in improving how biodiversity data are integrated, interpreted, and used.
