GiGL’s Board of Directors are central to our work and our success. Their commitment and expertise helps guide GiGL and keeps us moving forward and developing. Directors are on the front line of biodiversity and open space work in the capital. They are GiGL service users and contribute to our data banks, as well as serving as ambassadors for GiGL….
What was the first London Recorders’ Day all about? At its heart was a celebration of the people who care deeply about the wildlife in our capital. Its vision was to showcase the work of individuals, groups and organisations who, through wildlife recording, are making a difference to our knowledge of biodiversity, conservation of species and habitats, and enjoyment of living in London…
GiGL’s Board of Directors are central to our work and our success. Their commitment and expertise helps guide GiGL and keeps us moving forward and developing. Until recently Richard held the position of Group Head of Environmental Sustainability at VINCI PLC. He joined GiGL’s Board in October 2018…
GiGL’s Board of Directors are central to our work and our success. Their commitment and expertise helps guide GiGL and keeps us moving forward and developing. Tony joined GiGL’s Board in October 2018. As well as his position of GiGL Director he is Vice Chair of Big Lottery Fund and a trustee for The Conservation Volunteers and Friends of the Earth, amongst others…
After false starts, and to echoes of the Specials ‘Ghost Town’, I went to the Netherlands in 1980 to find work; there was no work here, especially for a holder of a sociology degree. I became a gardener in Haarlem, growing bulbs for Wisley and Kew Gardens, then on my return to the UK I began my own gardening business, now run by my son (with some of the same customers)…
Written as a response to the Eden Project – the world famous geodesic domed botanical spectacular in Cornwall – this book is as much a reflection on humankind’s relationship with plants as it is on the myths of its sub-title…
The 18th National Biodiversity Network (NBN) Conference was held in November. The GiGL team made their way to Nottingham to benefit from two days of talks on the theme of “the NBN in a changing climate”…
Chloë is GiGL’s Partnership Manager. She works with the team on partnership development and oversees service delivery to GiGL’s funding partners as well as core work on datasets and information systems…
The GiGL team has a wealth of different expertise. Whilst we don’t generally use our species identification skills on a daily basis, it’s important we have an affinity for the ID requirements essential to accurately record different taxa…
My desire for identifying wildlife started at a very young age, sometime between five and seven, when it was usual for me to be found crawling under school huts. A lot of my childhood was spent crawling around looking at invertebrates in my local park in Luton, Bedfordshire where I grew up. However…
When you Google ‘Warwick Gardens Peckham’ you get a mixed bag of results, from the park’s Twitter account run by the Friends of Warwick Gardens, describing it as ‘Peckham’s premier 24 hour municipal open space’, through to numerous estate agents’ websites promising properties to rent and buy…
Katharine is GiGL’s community officer. She delivers work for members of the public and community groups, as well as carrying out work with students that wish to use GiGL data for research projects. At times she focuses on internal database work and core projects.
The importance of wildlife recording first dawned on me in my late teens. During the early 1980s, I volunteered, at a Shropshire site called Stoneyhill, to look for three species of clubmoss ferns. Remarkably, they included alpine clubmoss – a species not recorded in the county since 1726. Being exceptional county rarities, their discovery …
Most people don’t look to the sky over London for migrating birds. I never used to. Until, way back in the early 1990s, I was waiting at a bus stop on Tottenham High Road. I looked up and noticed a smoky, long line of wood pigeons. I counted over four hundred before …
Are you enthralled by Ephemeroptera? Can you tell a Baetis rhodani from a Cloeon dipterum? Do you find fungi fascinating or think slime mould is sensational? If so, then you may be just the person we are looking for.
Richard Jefferies’ 1885 novel, After London, opens with a wonderful description of nature recovering after an unspecified disaster has befallen London and created a large lake in the middle of England. Jefferies is probably better known for his …
Emma Knowles is GiGL’s partnership officer. She delivers work for existing GiGL partners with service level agreements, as well as carrying out work with students that wish to use GiGL data for research projects. At times she focuses on internal database work and core projects. …
Collecting and submitting records provides a focus for my wildlife outings. That being said, I try to remember that looking for wildlife is not simply about numbers. For me, it may have been initially, but it certainly is not now. It’s also about having fun. …
GiGL’s Board of Directors are central to our work and our success. Their commitment and expertise helps guide GiGL and keeps us moving forward and developing. Directors are on the front line of biodiversity and open space work in the capital. They are GiGL service users and contribute to our data banks, as well as serving as ambassadors for GiGL.
In 2011, I wrote about my involvement with the ornithology records of the London Natural History Society, noting that I had first crossed their path some twenty years before that. Five years on, the nature of the project has changed, but much of the original challenge remains. I had seen my role, offering services to GiGL to process some old data, as not too demanding. However, when space in the Union …
When I was a kid and teenager, I spent a lot of time looking for fossils, fungi and berries. It didn’t occur to me at the time to try and put a label on everything, beyond whether it was useful or edible. It was much later that I became interested in identifying what I saw around me and then in counting it and recording it. When I moved to London I was fascinated by the quantity and variety of wildlife I discovered in an urban environment.
Once a year, local environmental records centres (LERCs) have the opportunity to meet at their association’s (ALERC) conference. As we all operate in separate geographic locations, it is great to come together to share learning and inspiration. This year, it was also good to celebrate our new status as accredited members of ALERC.
This year’s NBN conference, held in Edinburgh, was titled “Going with the flow: supporting the NBN data flow pathway”. This was a very timely topic for GiGL, as we have just written our own Data Flow Strategy. So, we happily joined the recording community for two days of talks and workshops centred around where biological data comes from, verification of records and the movement of data.
Suzie Jackman, Environmental and Sustainability Manager, Rail and Underground, for Transport for London, as well as a GiGL Director is our interviewee for this issue. GiGL’s Board of Directors are central to our work and our success. Their commitment and expertise helps guide GiGL and keeps us moving forward and developing.
How can I encapsulate twenty years of records centre development in London in a single article? I could chart our history through various consultations, through the process of deciding what a London environmental records centre would look like, or through statistics that show how our data holdings have grown and improved over time.
When communicators introduce the idea of a logical, step-by-step approach to communications planning, the common response is: “But communications is too messy for that kind of organised approach.” But this inherent messiness is exactly why it needs a linear, systematic method; to bring science to the art of communications.
To encourage idea sharing and inspire new projects, in each GiGLer edition we will be highlighting a couple of examples of how GiGL partners have used their SLAs. Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss utilising any of the services mentioned, or if you have a project using GiGL data that you would like to share.
GiGL’s Board of Directors are central to our work and our success. Their commitment and expertise helps guide GiGL and keeps us moving forward and developing. Directors are on the front line of biodiversity and open space work in the capital. They are GiGL service users and contribute to our data banks, as well as serving as ambassadors for GiGL.
It is central to GiGL’s philosophy that we don’t work in isolation. This philosophy also applies to our governance. Last year, we invited contacts to join a new combined “GiGL Advisory Panel” giving us an even wider range of industry knowledge and expertise.
GiGL’s Board of Directors are central to our work and our success. Their commitment and expertise helps guide GiGL and keeps us moving forward and developing. Directors are on the front line of biodiversity and open space work in the capital. They are GiGL service users and contribute to our data banks, as well as serving as ambassadors for GiGL.
In January 2015, after a decade at GiGL, I resigned my position as Operations Manager to take a much needed sabbatical with my young family. We headed to Mauritius, where I branded beaches with ‘GiGL Rocks!’ footprints using the custom flip-flops given to me as a leaving present.
GiGL’s Board of Directors are central to our work and our success. Their commitment and expertise helps guide GiGL and keeps us moving forward and developing. Directors are on the front line of biodiversity and open space work in the capital. They are GiGL service users and contribute to our data banks, as well as serving as ambassadors for GiGL.
GiGL’s Board of Directors are central to our work and our success. Their commitment and expertise helps guide GiGL and keeps us moving forward and developing. Directors are on the front line of biodiversity and open space work in the capital. They are GiGL service users and contribute to our data banks, as well as serving as ambassadors for GiGL.
There is a lot of cross-pollination amongst staff in the environmental records centre community. Outside of their paid jobs, many of the UK’s 100+ records centre staff are involved with local and national recording schemes. Some of them are county recorders. Some help run related businesses, including those who sit on the board of the Association of …
Photography is not only a profession and an art form, it is also a popular amateur pastime. The accessibility of photography as a hobby has been greatly increased by the rise of digital technology. The number of magazines, websites and courses available on the subject confirm its popularity. The rapid capture and instant sharing of everyday photographs has been facilitated by mobile phone cameras and social media platforms such as Flikr, Instagram and Twitter.
London’s open spaces weave through housing estates; grand London plane trees overhang busy roads; and gulls settle in wet patches of local football fields. iGiGL is a great tool for a little armchair sightseeing of the 47% of Greater London that is green.Clicking on the intriguing shapes that outline London’s parks and open spaces will bring back a wealth of information on site uses and facilities, a description of the wildlife or habitats, and snippets of local interest or history.
GiGL’s Board of Directors are central to our work and our success. Their commitment and expertise helps guide GiGL and keeps us moving forward and developing. Here, Valerie Selby, Chair of the Board of Directors, steps up to the plate and volunteers to be our first Director interviewee.
Armed with only a passion for numbers and a particular interest in wildlife statistics, I arrived at GiGL for my week’s work experience not entirely sure what I would be expected to do.
After settling in, I was presented with the number of records for three London boroughs.
I have always admired the GiGL teams’ approach to technology. They understand, better than any group of people I know, how technology can be used to achieve great results, to tell stories that inspire change, and not just to impress and scare lesser mortals. Many of GiGL’s service users may not be aware of the detail and intelligence that goes into every product and service they create.
The GiGL team represent the partnership and their data at many events throughout the year, from regular London-wide fora to one-off specialist meetings and workshops.
One such specialist workshop I attended earlier in the year was the London Geodiversity Partnership’s (LGP) ‘Overground – underground: London’s geodiversity for London’s people’.
As avid GiGLer readers will know, the project that initially scoped out support for a London environmental records centre was set up by London Wildlife Trust with funding from City Bridge Trust in 1996. An independent consultation in 2002 produced a records centre development plan for London. It was agreed that the London Wildlife Trust’s project would be turned into a fully-fledged environmental records centre over a two-year development period.
From its inception, Greenspace Information for Greater London (GiGL) has been a partnership organisation. We have worked very hard to raise our profile among the organisations that use and contribute to local record centres. So, almost a year ago GiGL plunged into the world of social media and set up a Twitter account.
London has some wonderful open spaces and some dreadful ones. It has been my one-day-a week job for the last six months to visit them all and check the features GiGL knows to exist. When the weather has been fine, I have jumped on a train, with my rucksack full of papers, to mostly unheard of destinations.
We are in the process of setting GiGL up as a community interest company (CIC). This will mean that as of January 2013 GiGL will be an independent organisation as recommended in the local records centre development plan that initiated the establishment of GiGL in 2004.
The CIC set-up will not change the partnership, products and services or staff team, but the CIC will have a new board of directors who will oversee the business. The directors will initially be drawn from the current GiGL Steering Group members.
The new political focus on a “Big Society” and the serious funding challenge that faces the nature conservation sector as a result of the Comprehensive Spending Review presents opportunities and challenges to the biodiversity delivery. An MSc project investigating...
John O’Neil, a PhD student at Glasgow Caledonian University, used GiGL’s open space data to assess the quality of the green network in Islington. His research has resulted in the creation of a new tool to help you get the most out of your green infrastructure. Strategic and local planning policies increasingly seek to improve quality of life, to conserve and enhance biodiversity and respond to the challenges of climate change by providing high quality networks of urban green spaces.
Last year I undertook a photographic invertebrate study of a seemingly insignificant park in London. I was interested in what I would find in a small urban park. I chose Warwick Gardens in Peckham as it was close to my home, making it easy to pop there for a couple of hours each day. My mission was to photograph everything that moved.
Held in London’s Excel centre, Ecobuild is the world’s biggest event for sustainable design, construction and the built environment, bringing together the latest ideas and innovations for the future of sustainable building. The exhibition ran for three days and attracted thousands of people from a wide array of industries and interest groups.
The successful integration of biodiversity, and an understanding of the services that ecosystems can provide, will be crucial to a healthy built environment. In recognition of […]
My connection with GiGL began with Ian Holt, the then warden of Sydenham Hill Wood, in 2006. In order to make the most of my baby boomer final salary pension I was planning to retire from my job as Librarian at the Horniman Museum where Ian was based. As I told Ian, I was looking for some good works to amuse myself and (no doubt) make work for others …