Examination of Witnesses (Questions 195-199)
Sir Neil Chalmers, Dr Jim Munford, Dr Mark Hill and
Dr Ian McLean
29 APRIL 2008
Q195 Chairman: Welcome to our witnesses;
we are most grateful to you. I apologise for the fact that I am
deputising for the Chairman but, as I explained outside, he has
been delayed in Scotland. There is an information note available
for the public. This sets out the Members' declared interests,
and I think I should at this point remind you that I was once
Chairman of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee and that is
not totally irrelevant to today's proceedings. Indeed, I get a
pension from Natural England, I am glad to report! Would you like
to introduce yourselves.
Sir Neil Chalmers: Thank you, my Lord. My name
is Neil Chalmers and I am the Chairman of the National Biodiversity
Network Trust.
Dr Munford: I am Jim Munford, I am the Programme
Director of the National Biodiversity Network Trust.
Dr Hill: I am Mark Hill and I am Head of the
Biological Records Centre at Monks Wood.
Dr McLean: I am Ian McLean and I work with the
Joint Nature Conservation Committee at Peterborough.
Q196 Chairman: Thank you very much.
Would any of you like to make an initial statement or would you
wish us to go straight into our questions?
Sir Neil Chalmers: May I make a very brief statement.
I think that taxonomy in the UK is massively dependent upon a
large band of enthusiastic amateurs and that this is underpinned
by professional taxonomy. The National Biodiversity Network Trust
brings these two together and we see the value of this. What I
would say in relation to that is that the amateur enthusiasts
have always been a very important part of British natural history
and understanding of biodiversity and that, if one is to address
the problems that face UK taxonomy today, one must recognise that
one must put money into the professional base but that will have
a very strong leverage effect as it filters out and interacts
with the amateur community out there.
Q197 Chairman: Thank you very much.
Would anyone else like to add anything at this stage? I think
my first question leads very neatly from Sir Neil's opening statement
and that is that we have heard time and again of the breadth of
amateur expertise in this country and of course of the long historical
professional expertise, but professional expertise, as in your
own evidence you have stated, suffers from retirements and lack
of replacement and therefore presumably the interaction between
professionals and amateurs is at risk. How will the decline in
numbers of professional taxonomists affect regional and local
biological recording and what needs to be done to maintain the
general level of skills to sustain field studies?
Sir Neil Chalmers: I will start with a general
answer, if I may. I think this decline will undermine the effectiveness
of the UK taxonomic effort, particularly in lesser well-known
taxonomic groups. With birds and butterflies there is not such
a problem but as soon as you get into the soil arthropods, let
us say, you are in deep difficulty. I think there is a very major
damaging effect that will result from this decline in professional
expertise. The answer must be, as I think has been argued by a
large number of people within the systematic community, a very
strong recognition of the importance of professional systematics
in this country and a much better method of supporting it.
Q198 Chairman: One of the pieces
of evidence that we have seen time and time again is that the
user community of the data which is generated both by amateurs
and professionals seems to get ever more insistent. There are
new biological action plans, water level management plans, biodiversity
action plans and all the rest of it. Is there any likelihood that
lack of relevant data is going to impact adversely on these user
communities?
Dr Munford: I think first of all it is important
to recognise the new trend in professional taxonomy which is away
from whole animal taxonomy and more to do with molecular science
and so forth. It is the whole animal taxonomy which underpins
recording activity particularly in the UK. The other important
point to make is that professional taxonomists do not come alone;
they also are involved or use collections, particularly at the
regional and local level, and these are very important for underpinning
enthusiast, volunteer-based biological recording in the UK.
Dr Hill: I would say that there was very much
extra value to be obtained from those professional taxonomists
who engage strongly in the community. I think they contribute
absolutely enormously but this is something perhaps which may
not always be sufficiently rewarded.
Q199 Lord Krebs: Could I just pick
up on that point from Dr Hill. I was wondering how for example
the NBN facilitates the interaction of amateurs and professionals
and, to pick up on your point, how one can extract the most value
out of the existing professional community, and also perhaps as
a supplementary to that, how the NBN through its member groups
engages with young people?
Sir Neil Chalmers: If I give a general answer
to that, my Lord Chairman, and perhaps ask the Programme Director
to speak more specifically. The NBN has various components and
a very important component is the group of people who collect
data and feed those data into the databases of the National Biodiversity
Network. They are sometimes individuals and they are often important
natural history societies and groups around the country. In interacting
with the NBN, we have a very clear way of ensuring that their
data are input into the databases, that their input is recognised
and that its quality is validated. It is this interface between
the data donor community and the professionals who validate the
data and add to its value that I think is a fundamental part of
the NBN's work.
Dr Munford: I think it is important to stress
that certainly biological recording is probably as strong now
as it has ever been, but there are important differences, so that,
for example, if you look at the membership of the Botanical Society
of the British Isles, I think it would be fair to say, if you
went back to the 1950s for example, that a large proportion of
their membership would have been professional taxonomists. That
is no longer the case and a much smaller percentage of the membership
of that learned society is made up of professionals but the society
itself has never been bigger, so there is an interesting drift
towards a preponderance of what might be called amateur (although
we prefer the word "volunteer") recorders. The other
part of the question was to do with our engagement with younger
recorders and indeed the public in general. The data that we make
available through the NBN is not just dependent upon quality;
we will take any biological data, biodiversity data, spatial or
distribution data and make it available, but we lay great stress
on the metadata associated with that data so that end users can
distinguish between high-quality and low-quality data. I think
that is quite important because if you look at some of the most
well-subscribed recording initiatives, for example the Big Garden
Birdwatch run by the RSPB, in 2007 they had over 400,000 participants
generating six million records. Most of those will not have been
professional ornithologists, they would just have been members
of the public, but it is easy to recognise garden birds, they
are not subject to mistakes, and so we are placing great emphasis
in the NBN on recognising those taxa which are by their nature
difficult to identify and putting in place measures to assure
the quality of those records.
| 
