BTO's partnership with JNCC

The Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) is the statutory adviser to the UK Government and devolved administrations on UK and international nature conservation. Its work contributes to maintaining and enriching biological diversity and sustaining natural systems, and its partnership with BTO contributes to understanding the state of wildlife at UK and country levels.

Partnership schemes, which include the Bird Ringing Scheme, the Nest Record Scheme (NRS), the Wetland Bird Survey (WeBS) and the Breeding Bird Survey (BBS), have identified major changes in environmental quality affecting biodiversity and linked to declines in farmland and woodland birds, wintering wildfowl and summer migrants.

The partnership provides cost-effective delivery of both national and international statutory reporting requirements and wider evidence needs. JNCC and BTO funds lever additional support from the RSPB and the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, and 50,000 skilled volunteers deliver monitoring information of sufficient scale to track environmental changes across the full range of habitats: from urban and farmland to semi-natural and upland areas.

Advances in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and statistical methods have allowed increased integration of partnership data with those from other sources. This process gives a better understanding of how ecosystems’ resilience may be decreasing, making them more vulnerable to other pressures.

Various conservation and policy-relevant products, such as The State of the UK’s Birds and the National Ecosystem Assessment, rely on the effective interpretation of partnership monitoring data.