The Better Biodiversity Data project on tour: learning about marine mammal recording
Christine Tansey, the Better Biodiversity Data (BBD) project Partnership Officer from the National Biodiversity Network Trust recently joined Silurian on a trip from Ullapool back home to Tobermory. With a background in terrestrial conservation and recording, this opportunity gave Christine an insight into the protocols used and challenges faced when collecting and processing marine sightings and acoustic data. Christine shares here experience here…
I was recently lucky enough to join the HWDT crew, colleagues from NatureScot’s marine survey team, the Marine Mammals Stranding Scheme, photographers and media content creators on Silurian’s trip home after an intense month of cetacean surveying.
From my perspective, as someone more used to working with (very stationary!) trees, it was an eye-opening experience about the challenges, and solutions, to monitoring mobile species in Scotland’s seas. One of my key aims for joining the sail was to gain a greater understanding of the approaches required when recording marine species.
Since March 2023, I have been working on the BBD project, led and managed by the NBN Trust and funded by the Scottish Government and NatureScot. Over 2-years, we will be taking forward some of the key recommendation from the Scottish Biodiversity Information Forum (SBIF) review on Biological Recording Infrastructure in Scotland.
BBD will develop the first steps in a strategic approach to the collection, collation and sharing of biological data across Scotland. This will involve working closely with Local Environmental Records Centres (LERCs), Recording Groups and other members of SBIF and the wider recording community in Scotland, such as HWDT. To help safeguard Scotland’s biodiversity data, we will develop a shared database and a national hub that supports LERCs, Recording Groups and other partners and streamlines access to terrestrial, freshwater and marine data.
HWDT is one of the key organisations supporting marine mammal data collection in Scotland, and demonstrate a model quite different to recording insects or plants that many terrestrial recorders will be familiar with. My weekend on Silurian very clearly highlighted the difficulty of making visual observations of species found beneath the waves, as the sea state was too rough to see much. However, we were able to see how Jenny Hampson, HWDT’s Fieldwork and Research Manager, deployed the hydrophone to capture acoustic records of dolphins and porpoises while those of us on deck concentrated on the waves splashing aboard and holding on!
Through structured survey trips to collect visual observations and acoustic data, Silurian has trained over 1,000 citizen scientists in the last 20 years. To gather these types of data in a marine environment, significant resources are required, and HWDT’s invaluable data are used by NatureScot and others, in monitoring and research.
HWDT ensure that these data are made accessible, by sharing maps of sightings per unit effort (SPUE), detections per unit effort (SPUE) and species richness with NatureScot. They also submit their data directly to the Joint Cetacean Data Programme and species records are shared with the NBN Atlas. My recent trip with HWDT did highlight the ongoing challenge in sharing acoustic records more widely, as their compatibility with existing data management systems has been limited to date.
The BBD project is now working with representatives of the marine data community to ensure that future access to marine data is built into a National biodiversity data infrastructure. We know that our terrestrial, freshwater and marine spheres have often been siloed from one another, and BBD aims to ensure that those working to safeguard Scotland’s biodiversity have a better way to record, access and analyse biodiversity data, from source to sea.
