Memorandum submitted by the Scottish Environment
Protection Agency
The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA)
welcomes the opportunity to provide its views to the House of
Lords Science and Technology Committee's follow-up inquiry on
systematic biology research and taxonomy. As the Agency is principally
an end-user or beneficiary of the process of taxonomic development
and the production of trained taxonomists, our comments are confined
to the issue of a taxonomic "Skills Base".
As the Committee will be aware, SEPA is the
environmental regulator in Scotland responsible for control of
emissions to land, air and water, for the regulation of the storage,
transport and disposal of waste and for the licensing of the keeping
and disposal of radioactive substances. SEPA is responsible for
the relevant chemical, biological and microbiological monitoring,
river basin management planning, Flood Risk assessment and Flood
Warning, reporting on the state of environment, and is a joint
competent authority for Strategic Environmental Assessments. The
strong scientific element of SEPA's remit is reflected in SEPA's
2002 Management Statement from the then-Scottish Executive, which
states that one of SEPA's main objectives is
"|to operate to high professional standards,
based on sound science, information and analysis of the environment
and of processes which affect it;"
As such, we have a strong business need for
access to a pool of trained, experienced taxonomists. Traditionally,
the taxonomic skills required by the UK's environment protection
agencies would have been almost exclusively in the aquatic ecology
fields, both freshwater and marine, and this remains a key skill
set for our work. Latterly, however, the growth in importance
of the biodiversity policy arena and the need to assess and monitor
the impacts of aerial deposition on habitats and species, have
begun to drive the requirement for staff with more terrestrial
taxonomic skills.
Even within the aquatic sciences, where in the
past SEPA's taxonomic skills have been strong in relation to particular
taxonomic groups, our taxonomic requirements are expanding as
a result of the wider range of aquatic taxa we will be required
to monitor, as a result of the European Water Framework Directive.
This covers both freshwater and marine taxa. We have recently
developed a new monitoring programme and network for Scotland.
Implementation of this, and other elements of WFD, has also seen
a significant increase in the absolute number of scientific staff
employed by SEPA who require taxonomic skills, for example, for
diatoms, freshwater and marine phytoplankton aquatic macrophytes,
freshwater fish.
As a prospective employer advertising for specialist
staff to cover a wide range of taxonomic bases, SEPA's finds it
increasingly difficult to recruit trained taxonomists, and access
to certain taxonomic specialisms is particularly limited (eg for
phytoplankton, phytobenthos/ diatom and macrophyte specialisms).
As such, SEPA has to devote increasing resource to training in
these areas, where it would previously have expected to recruit
already-experienced, trained taxonomists. SEPA has also participated
in a small way in the taxonomic apprenticeship scheme run by the
British Trust for Conservation Volunteers (BTCV) and supported
by the funding from the National Lottery. The BTCV scheme, while
extremely worthwhile for both the apprentices and the hosting
organisations, is, however, unlikely to stem the decline in the
taxonomic skill base in the UK.
We have discussed this issue informally with
colleagues in the Environment Agency. Their requirement for ecologists
with good taxonomic and diagnostic skills is similar to our own.
Their recent experience is that the introduction, within the Agency,
of rigorous quality assurance, better identification keys, improved
training and mentoring has made a tremendous difference to the
skills base of ecologists employed by the Agency, compared with
the situation in predecessor organisations 20 years ago. The key
concern is maintaining the taxonomic capacity and skills in technical
centres of expertise (eg Natural History Museum, Freshwater Biological
Association, NERC Institutes) that allow the mentoring and training
of ecologists recruited by the Agency to continue into the future.
It is this particular concern of a decline in the taxonomic capacity
in these specialist organisations, a critical issue that was highlighted
by the Freshwater Biological Association—Centre for Ecology
and Hydrology review of freshwater biology in the UK:
(http://www.fba.org.uk/pdf/ReviewOfFreshwaterEcology.pdf).
So, the real problem lies in combination of
(i) the difficulty of recruiting candidates with a deep understanding
of aquatic ecology generally, and (ii) a decline in the taxonomic
capacity of specialist institutions. Both are having an impact
on the ability to maintain and develop specialists within the
environment and nature conservation agencies.
As a public body committed to openness and transparency,
SEPA feels that it is appropriate that this response be placed
on the public record.
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