Caledonian Conservation wins NBN John Sawyer Award!

Caledonian Conservation is proud to announce that we were selected as the winner of the 2016 National Biodiversity Network (NBN) Trust John Sawyer Award for open data.  This award is presented annually to the data partner who is making the greatest contribution to open biodiversity data in the UK.  The award is named in memory of John Sawyer, a former NBN CEO who is highly inspirational.  Caledonian Conservation is only the second organisation to be presented with the John Sawyer Award – the first being the Mammal Society in 2015.

Several members of the Caledonian Conservation team attended the awards ceremony at the NBN Conference held at the National Museum of Scotland on 17th November 2016.  Chris Cathrine (Director (Ecology)) accepted the award on behalf of the organisation, and said:

“We are all deeply honoured that Caledonian Conservation Ltd has been selected for the John Sawyer Award.

Caledonian Conservation Ltd is dedicated to ensuring as much of our biodiversity data is publicly available as possible within legal restrictions, and NBN is the perfect platform for this.

It's so important that everyone is able to learn about the wildlife in their local area for their own enjoyment and to ensure there is a sense of ownership leading to a desire to protect biodiversity for future generations.

It is also essential that biodiversity data is available to academia and governments to monitor trends, and to professional ecologists designing habitat management plans or undertaking Ecological Impact Assessments for developments.

We hope that in future sharing of biodiversity data openly and at high resolution will be standard practice.”

We are pleased to say that we have many more records currently being formatted for submission to NBN, from a variety of projects (research, Site Condition Monitoring and development projects such as wind farms).  When uploaded to NBN, these datasets will be publicly available at the highest resolution possible under a CC BY licence (under which data are made available for any use provided that attribution is appropriately given for the sources of data used), as with our existing records.

To learn more about NBN Trust and explore data (including Caledonian Conservation's) go to: https://nbn.org.uk/