Tom Smith, MD of RSK Biocensus, shares his thoughts on the importance of contributing through data collection and research, filling ecology knowledge gaps, the value of small achievements and giving something back.
Over and above our business as usual it is really important to me personally and to RSK Biocensus as a business that we support research through funding and provision of data. Of course we have to find the right balance. We are a business first and foremost, so all our efforts in finding ecological solutions are primarily geared towards the needs of our clients, but supporting and undertaking research and contributing to science has always played a part in what we do.
Data Collection
As ecological consultants (both professionally and personally), we are gathering data all the time, and we can all recognise the potential to use some of that data to fill gaps in ecological evidence and improve our understanding. I believe that we should always consider the value of the data we collect and whether we could collect more when we are undertaking routine consultancy work. Yes, we have our large flagship research projects but there are so many smaller things we could also achieve, just by thinking about the data we collect and how we can use that data to inform the evidence base.
As a business, our ambition is to foster the sharing of data amongst ecological consultancies to support research to fill knowledge gaps.
Personal passions
Many of our ecologists, including myself, have their own specific (and sometimes quite niche) ecology interests; this creates an opportunity for additional data to be collected whilst pursuing these interests in a voluntary capacity. That’s something we encourage across the board; data should be collected in such a way that it could feed into something bigger, or even just supporting national databases for species records. Just doing something as simple as adding an additional observation to your field notes could make a difference.
There are so many people in our business who are passionate about their subjects and would collect information and data naturally anyway, so giving them a platform on which to share their findings is a really positive thing to do. My personal passion is the identification of moths, it’s always exciting to find something unexpected and noteworthy in the garden: this Dewicks Plusia (pictured) is only the second ever recorded in Cheshire.
So, there are many positives to contributing to research in this way and I can’t really see any negatives. Arguably there is the cost of the time spent doing so but if data collections can be incorporated into your routine work, then these costs are negligible when weighed against the benefits (although additional costs will arise from time spent analysing, interpreting and publishing on field data).
Making a contribution is not just about collecting field data and reporting your findings. We also encourage all our ecologists to contribute to thought pieces relating to the subjects they are passionate about.
Research doesn’t have to be “big”
Conducting research and sharing the outcomes have always been important to us here at RSK Biocensus but I think in the past we have tended to focus more on comprehensive pieces of work. The Bird Survey Guidance initiative and the latest edition of the UK Bat Mitigation Guidelines are brilliant examples. However, these types of endeavour tend to be driven by the most experienced ecologists because obviously they are the experts in that field. What I would also like us to do is to show that all our ecologists can make useful contributions to research and to nurture their growth in that area, alongside their field skills. So, we are looking for ways to support more of our ecologists, no matter their level of experience, to think about research and to make their own contributions.
I think that sometimes the “research” label can be a little intimidating when actually research can be something really quite simple and this is an important message to get across. Our ecologists are out there all the time and may well observe something that has never been recorded before, possibly on the periphery of the survey they were actually carrying out. But even though this might be considered relatively insignificant, it may still be important to record. Even the publication of a short article on an incidental observation contributes to everyone’s wider ecological knowledge. We have many very experienced ecologists within the business who are more than happy to support with the more technical aspects, so often it is just a matter of increasing the confidence of the more junior members of the team to show that they too can make a valuable contribution.
Making a positive contribution
It’s good to remember why people come into this profession: they want to learn more about the environment, animals, plants etc and they want to make a difference. But as work in a consultancy setting is driven by the needs of our clients as we work with them to find solutions, we just need to think a little more about how we can still contribute to greater understanding of the natural world and contribute to the wider scientific community. So, our work is not just about being at the forefront of ecological consultancy, it’s also about contributing a little more and giving something back.