Julie Cox, GiGL Partnership Officer  It’s been a long, hot and busy summer. Whilst the weather will have provided many opportunities for our city’s recorders to be out and about in our wonderful open spaces, the impacts of the extended dry spell on London’s wildlife inhabitants, and the records we receive this year, has yet…

Chloë Smith, GiGL Partnership Manager  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. Town or countryside? I love things about the culture and environments of both. Summer or winter? Summer. Early bird or…

Mandy Rudd, GiGL Chief Executive  The draft Mayor’s London Environment Strategy was published last summer, and after a 14 week consultation period that ran from August to November 2017, which received several thousand responses including ours, the final strategy was published at the end of May 2018. The remit of the strategy is very broad,…

Emma Knowles, GiGL Partnership Officer  CPRE London have recently published a report on London’s Green Belt and Metropolitan Open Land (MOL), for which GiGL provided our expertise, including data analysis, visualisations and maps. The report aims to raise awareness of MOL and provide information on its distribution, along with that of Green Belt, to politicians…

Julie Cox, GiGL Partnership Officer 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. We’re incredibly lucky to have Claudia Watts as our GiGL Royal Parks…

Tony Wileman 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,…

Katharine Davies, GiGL Community Officer  The Zooniverse project to transcribe historic London Bird Records collected by the London Natural History Society (LNHS) was launched at the end of April 2018. The LNHS has been a long term partner of GiGL; they have been recording within a 20 mile radius from St. Paul’s Cathedral since 1958.…

Lyndsey Cox, GiGL Senior Community Officer  Every new technology brings with it new advantages and challenges. So it has been in the world of species recording. Phone apps, websites and online recording have allowed a streamlining of the process from observer to database. Records can be uploaded at the click of a button. It is…

Chloë Smith, GiGL Partnership Manager  Achieving biodiversity net gain means that changes brought about by development conclude with biodiversity faring better than it did before works took place. This should ideally be at the same location, but where that is not possible may be achieved by improvements for biodiversity in other locations. Thinking on how…

Mandy Rudd, GiGL Chief Executive  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 in the area.…