Regional Biodiversity Audit now available

The provisional audit consists of three documents:

A Summary Audit Table (the audit),      The individual Habitat Audits behind the overall audit (the habitats audits) and       The Appendix, which provides some caveats around interpretation of the data and also the habitat descriptions.

The YHBF will be using this audit/information in several ways in the development of the YHBF ‘regional delivery plan’  - which is our regional contribution to the England Biodiversity Strategy/Framework - which will be complete by March 2010.

The audit itself will be primarily used in two ways:

1)      It has helped identify core project/programmes in place for priority BAP habitat work in  the region, and give us our best picture yet of how well we are doing, and also where there are major gaps in delivery (both gaps in spatial delivery and also gaps in delivery of certain habitat types) – and hence will help us address these gaps into the future.

2)      The audit will be used to revisit the provisional habitat targets expressed in the Yorkshire and Humber Regional Biodiversity Strategy, and will assist us in developing a more credible, realistic yet challenging set of regional targets (which will form the basis of the regional delivery plan). We will be putting these revised targets out to a short period of consultation early in the New Year.

I hope you find the information of interest, but please take note of the limitations of the data (see caveats in the introduction and appendix) and also the gaps in the overall data set. If you are in a position to provide us with any information on any major omissions we would gladly accept the information. However, the focus now will be to plan for, and take forward delivery on the ground.

Many thanks to Clare Robinson, Chris McGregor and Jenny Craven of Natural England for collating this data, and for many other individuals and organisations across the region for their assistance in providing data.

If you have any questions of further information, please contact the regional or sub-regional coordintors or Natural England.