A whole year has passed since the “Biodiversity Evidence – Better Outcomes from Planning” project began. The project aims to support London’s Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) to achieve better outcomes for biodiversity through the planning process. We started by finding out how biodiversity is currently being taken into account and about the challenges faced. The information collected then informed the production of resources and training for use by LPA planners as guidance when looking into biodiversity matters of development projects…

Jane Ruhland, member of the Ealing Wildlife Group On the 1st January 2019 I began a year-long personal project – every day I would observe and record wildlife through the lens of a camera. I was inspired by the Ealing Wildlife Group who run a Facebook group which I’d recently joined and with whom I…

Part of the service that we provide specifically to our Service Level Agreement (SLA) partners is to ensure that they can access GiGL data on their own systems. Every quarter we send copies of the data that represent snapshots of the database at those times. This “data exchange” is usually during the last week of April, July, October and January…

This spring Londoners have helped protect each other by curtailing our daily travels to stop the spread of the coronavirus. This has also, necessarily, affected our trips to visit greenspaces and see wildlife. We are still receiving records from people’s gardens, of wildlife spotted through windows or from permitted walks…

Data is dull, isn’t it? It’s just a load of facts and figures collected together, a series of ones and zeros that don’t seem to be worth paying much attention to. But when it is presented in the right way data really comes alive. It is possible to convey a whole story in just one image that is simultaneously accurate, revealing and persuasive…

The last few months have been anything but usual. Whilst COVID-19 has brought about previously unforeseen changes to our daily-lives, GiGL is proud that we’ve been able to maintain as much of a standard service to our stakeholders as possible…

Bedfont Lakes is a 72.5 hectare country park on the edge of Greater London, and one of the best birdwatching sites in the southwest of the capital. Its size rivals that of Greenwich Park and Wandsworth Common. Yet, when I mention it among Londoner friends and colleagues, no one’s ever heard of it…

The GiGL team were trying to think of a fun way to celebrate April fool’s day. What map could we generate and share with our community? After deliberating on the usual mythical candidates we settled on the idea of dragons; thinking to ourselves that there must be data out there that we could use to create a fun map…

Julie is one of GiGL’s Partnership Officers. She delivers work for existing GiGL partners with Service Level Agreements. She is Commissioning Editor of the GiGLer newsletter and co-ordinates our SLA Spotlight bulletin for existing and potential SLA partners…

Anyone familiar with our strategic plan knows that our vision is that ‘London’s natural environment is appreciated, understood, considered and improved’, but how do we monitor and evaluate our services and identify the outcomes and impact of our work? Can we demonstrate that London’s human inhabitants are benefiting from our work too?..