The winners and runners up of the National Biodiversity Network Awards for Wildlife Recording 2019 were announced at the Albert Hall, Nottingham during an evening ceremony on Wednesday 13th November 2019.
These national Awards recognise and celebrate the outstanding contributions people are making to wildlife recording and data sharing, which is helping to improve our understanding of the UK’s wildlife.
Many of the night’s winners have strong links to the FSC and we wanted to take a moment to celebrate their achievements again.
This award was won by Sue Taylor, from Hertfordshire. Sue has taken up regular wildlife recording in the last few years and is now carrying out surveys and other activities for a range of organisations. She is also a volunteer with the FSC BioLinks project in the South East region.
The big bonus is that I really enjoy it all. I love being out and about, finding and watching invertebrates, seeing the connections between living things and then the challenge of learning to identify them. Sometimes there is also the thrill of finding rarely recorded species and I can share the excitement with the other like-minded people I meet.
Sue Taylor
This award was won by Ian Wallace, from Liverpool, Merseyside, a long-standing friend of the FSC. Ian has been recording caddisflies since the 1970s, and has taught many FSC caddis identification courses during this time. He has also authored and collaborated on several books including the Simple Key to Caddis Larvae, published by FSC Publications. Ian has made over 410,000 records of caddis!
Every record advances our knowledge of a species’ biology and is thus a little bit of science in action. That has always driven my ambition as a personal recorder and underpins my efforts to improve identification resources to continually increase the number of people who will add caddis to the groups they record.
Ian Wallace
The runner-up for this award was Alan Outen, from Bedfordshire, who also volunteers with the FSC BioLinks Project.
One of the shortlisted recorders was Ian Cheeseborough, an FSC bees and wasps tutor, who has been especially active teaching FSC BioLinks courses over the last two years.
We are so happy that the Joy of Wildlife group is the winner of the NBN Group Award 2019. They are a group with strong ties to the FSC as they have been developed and supported by many FSC Biodiversity projects over the last eight years. They started in 2012 and concentrated on invertebrate recording in Shropshire. Since then, the group has widened to include botanists, birders, mycologists and lichenologists. The group visit sites most Wednesdays throughout the year and record every species they can find and identify. Many of the members are also tutors and regular attendees of FSC BioLinks events in the West Midlands.
It is always brilliant to find a new or rare species for an area or even the vice-county but it is equally important to us to record the more common species. We each have our own specialities and abilities but we try to learn off each other to broaden our knowledge and we will endeavour to show things of interest to anyone who joins us or ambles up to us to ask “what are you doing?” However, the most important factor is that we enjoy what we are doing and the camaraderie of the group; this encourages others to come along and try their hand at what we do.
Keith Fowler, coordinator of the Joy of Wildlife
The Earthworm Society of Britain was awarded the John Sawyer NBN Open Data Award 2019.
The award was collected by Keiron Brown, who as well as being FSC BioLinks Project Manager also coordinates the Earthworm Society of Britain (ESB) recording scheme. BioLinks Project Officer Charlie Bell is also on the ESB Committee and both Keiron and Charlie teach earthworm courses through the FSC BioLinks project.
