2026 is a year of significant anniversaries for us here at GiGL Towers. We launched as a hosted local environmental records centre 20 years ago, having spent two years in a development phase with a clear goal of established diversified and sustainable revenue streams from our services. This development phase built on work I started 25 years ago this year, with the launch of our data search service for clients, and the setting up of our first ever service level agreement, with the London Borough of Redbridge. This development was thanks in large part to LB Redbridge’s new Nature Conservation Officer at the time, who had worked with Dorset Environmental Records Centre in a previous role and was keen to support what we were trying to achieve for Greater London.
All of this built on the work of London Wildlife Trust’s Biological Recording Project (BRP), which launched 30 years ago this month (May 1996) after a lot of preparatory work and a successful funding bid to Bridgehouse Estates Trust. Alistair Kirk started in post as the new Biological Recording Officer to set up what was essentially a pilot project that would demonstrate aspects of what a local records centre could do for nature and people in London.
The Biological Recording Project had a series of objectives that included:
Theme: data gathering, dissemination and co-ordination
- To begin to build an accurate and detailed picture of wildlife and habitats in Greater London
- To help provide information for a Biodiversity Action Plan for London
- To help provide information for future State of the Environment reports
- To help provide monitoring against which biodiversity targets can be measured
Theme: site protection and management
- To help protect individual sites through an improved understanding of their unique importance and wider significance
- To measure the effectiveness of land management on nature reserves, leased owned or managed by the London Wildlife Trust
Theme: public information, education and empowerment
- To act as an accessible source of information for the general public on the wildlife around them
- To act as an educational resource for future generations
- To provide a mechanism for people to become involved in measuring and monitoring their local environment as part of Local Agenda 21 through an ongoing campaign of education and awareness focusing on particular species / habitats.
You can see from the objectives that establishing robust systems to centralise and analyse data were essential to the project’s success, but bringing people and organisations on board with the idea so they could help shape its direction was even more important. The systems were the easy part.
London’s First Biodiversity Data Systems
Alistair set up a version of Recorder 3, an MS-DOS based database developed in partnership by English Nature and the Wildlife Trusts that was designed to manage site and species data to a national standard. Alistair brought in Thurner Automation to provide technical support for this aspect of the project, as alongside expertise in the software, they had already helped to set up similar systems for local records centres in other counties. The initial species data entry focused on London Wildlife Trust’s surveys of their nature reserves, then moved on to inputting the results of the Trust’s first stag beetle survey in 1997, and the People’s Trust for Endangered Species stag beetle survey in 1998.
As I’ve mentioned in other articles, one of my first jobs for the BRP was photocopying pages of a large A to Z and plotting the records shared with us via the baby pink survey form by hand onto the photocopies, ready to transfer into GIS. Alistair and I would often compete with each other to see who could get the most dots onto maps in a given time. The hours flew by, and the new stag beetle dataset was used to create the distribution map for the legendary stag beetle advice note, written by Mathew Frith on behalf of London Biodiversity Partnership (LBP) and published in 1999.
Alongside setting up Recorder 3, Alistair was also creating London-wide GIS datasets from scratch, including mapping all of the Trust’s reserves, London’s Sites of Special Scientific Interest, Local Nature Reserves and Sites of Metropolitan Importance for the first time, an essential step towards the agreed approach to developing London’s biodiversity action plan. Whilst this may sound fairly straightforward, the challenges of developing a site-based system that linked to agreed boundaries and included unique site codes for the whole of Greater London were significant. Even overlaying these different datasets for the first time showed that most sites had very different boundaries for each of its designations due to the different criteria used to identify them.
In addition, London’s species experts were already recording to the Watsonian Vice County boundaries of South Essex, West Kent, Surrey, Middlesex, and Hertfordshire, or the London Natural History Society’s recording area, which is defined as a circle within a 20-mile radius of St Pauls Cathedral. The BRP eventually elected to use the London Ecology Unit’s habitat surveys that were conducted on a borough-by-borough basis as the foundation for identifying and describing sites in Recorder 3 and creating site boundaries and associated attributes in GIS.
Stakeholder Support & Engagement
The Biological Recording Project was stakeholder led from the outset, and its advisory group was made up of representatives from London Ecology Unit, London Natural History Society, London Wildlife Trust, English Nature and the Environment Agency. These same representatives also formed the data sub-group of the London Biodiversity Partnership, and their regular meetings covered agenda items for both initiatives. A wider network of stakeholders were involved in various events organised by the BRP to showcase its work and that of its partners for the duration of the funded project.
Alistair also spent a lot of time running introductory sessions to the BRP for people from local and national organisations keen to see the progress the project was making and to see GIS in action, often for the first time. When I joined the BRP as the assistant biological recording officer a year after it started, I used to eavesdrop on Alistair’s introductions to see if he had once again managed to weave the lyrics of Nik Kershaw’s ‘The Riddle’ into his GIS demo, sneaking ‘near a tree by a river there’s a hole in the ground…’ into his narrative nearly every time and seeing if anyone noticed.
Despite strong support and clear progress towards the project’s aims, there was also resistance and suspicion about what we were trying to achieve. This came through clearly in the independent review of the BRP at the end of the funded project in 1999. Feedback from advisory panel members and wider stakeholders ranged from praise for the team being ‘helpful, courteous and co-operative’ to one respondent admitting they ‘did not know who the project staff were’!
From Project to Records Centre
Soon after the BRP began, the Wildlife Trusts launched a series of regional consultations to support a bid to the Esmée Fairbairn Charitable Trust for a UK-wide project developing the role of records centres within the National Biodiversity Network. The project focused on best practice in biological recording and standards for data exchange, verification and access.
Although the London Wildlife Trust was unsuccessful in its bid for London to become one of the three pilot areas in the NBN’s ‘Linking Local Records Centres’ project, the BRP still benefited greatly through Ralph Gaines, the Trust’s Head of Conservation, who sat on the Wildlife Trusts’ NBN Group. The project’s workshops and conferences also connected us with colleagues from more established records centres, who were generous in sharing their knowledge and experience.
In late 1999, Alistair left the Trust to become the manager of Surrey Biodiversity Information Centre, and despite the initial grant funding having run out, I was asked to step up into the now vacant biological recording officer role. I was taken to one side by the Trust’s director who admitted he didn’t know what to do next and just suggested I ‘get on with it’.
I attended the always brilliant annual conference for the National Federation for Biological Recording (NFBR) in 2000, as they continued to champion the local records centre network within the wider NBN. I learnt a lot, and found myself sitting on a train platform afterwards with Alistair in his new role in Surrey and Henri from the Sussex Biodiversity Records Centre comparing notes about the various challenges we had in common. We agreed it was really helpful to talk to people in a similar role, so we organised and held the inaugural meeting of the London and South East Local Records Centre group soon afterwards. We still meet to this day to collaborate, share ideas and offer sanctuary.
And after 30 years of nature data, people, and persistence, here is the proud GiGL team celebrating our successful London Day of Nature event last weekend…
