Sue Adamson from Pill has a passion for bats. She runs ‘flappy hour’ inspired from the Bat Conservation Trust ‘sunset surveys’ where an hour is spent at sunset looking for bats. It is aimed at anyone and everyone and is a great way of taking action for nature locally, hanging out with other people and doing your bit for the environment. Bats are awesome! Sue agrees that bats are amazing nocturnal flying mammals – not only are they pollinators but also excellent indicator species for local biodiversity, showing us a lot about the state of the environment.

You can survey for many species! Including bats, birds, pond life, butterflies and moths, plants, trees, hedgerows and more. By surveying in one area, over time, you collect important data that speaks volumes about the area and helps to protect and enhance it.

Citizen wildlife reporting is a super effective way of taking action for nature, it can also be called wildlife surveying and monitoring. Your recorded sightings, when recorded properly, help protect local green spaces and show evidence that wildlife exists. Your survey results influence planning, local government and official decisions in regards to the management and use of the area in question.

Wildlife reporting provides a snapshot of an area and hard evidence about what’s happening locally and nationally. The more we know about species on a particular site, the greater the chance of protecting it and understanding more about that area. You can also track if changes made to local habitats have occurred in a positive or negative way.

How to get involved

There are many national monitoring programmes and local community and wildlife groups that organise survey sessions. They’re a great way to learn more about a species and an area, while meeting like-minded people in the process.

There are four key things to remember when making any wildlife record: Who, what, when and where.
 

Use BRERC

In Avon, Bristol Regional Environmental Records Centre (BRERC) is the organisation responsible for collating, verifying and distributing wildlife records, and anyone can contribute records to BRERC.
 

Read this if you use iNaturalist

We want to encourage everyone to try wildlife surveying and know what a difference it can make to give nature a voice and help protect local habitats. Whilst popular apps, such as iNaturalist, are fantastic resources for identifying what you’re looking at, the records might not be valuable to local record centres, especially if users apply the apps’ anonymity features. Therefore, Avon Wildlife Trust strongly encourages submitting records directly.

iNaturalist is fine to use, but please note… If you do wish to use iNaturalist and want your records to be useful, please ensure you do not anonymise the data, do not obscure the location, make sure you manually enter the location details, and change your licensing settings from the default to CC0. These are all features that make records usable for Local Environmental Record Centres. 

Make a difference locally

By building a better picture of the wildlife that you know exists in your area, we can help local authorities prioritise areas of value and track the spread of invasive species. We can understand and protect the populations of our wildlife like never before, giving nature and voice.

Get started today!