Please see the following request which we’ve received from Lucia Chmurova at Buglife. If you’d be interested in taking part please contact Lucia at Lucia.Chmurova@buglife.org.uk.
We are looking for conservation-minded people in and around Wye Valley and Forest of Dean area to help with user-testing/feedback on an Important Invertebrate Area profile document for this area. You do not need to be an entomologist. Thank you to those that attended our online mapping workshop – we would like to give you an update and invite further feedback. For those who haven’t attended, here is some background information to our Important Invertebrate Area work:
- Over the last few years Buglife have been working on developing an Important Invertebrate Areas map for Great Britain. This exciting work aims to identify nationally and internationally important places to direct and prioritise conservation of invertebrates and the habitats upon which they rely.
- We have already identified the broad-scale hectad areas for around 100 different IIAs, based on over 45 million invertebrate records from 80 invertebrate recording schemes.
- We are now making our way through these broader areas and run focussed workshops with local experts and stakeholders across the country to whittle these down to create fine-scale maps with sites of highest perceived value for invertebrates. The Wye Valley & Forest of Dean workshop has already been completed, please see the resulting IIA map attached (due to its wide shape, this comes in 2 parts).
- For each IIA, we are aiming to have a few different files available to download from our interactive map including a selection of maps and an area profile document describing the IIA landscape.
- We are hoping the resources will be used by a variety of users including conservation professionals, advisors, ecologists, land managers and wardens, (and further down the line) policy and outreach officers to inform their conservation and outreach actions.
It is the area profile document I would like to invite feedback for – please see the draft file attached.
Please let me know if you would be willing to give me some feedback on the profile document and I will send you a few questions. These are about the general document structure and if you are local, I would also love to hear about any area-specific conservation issues in different habitats.
Any feedback will be priceless – I will be producing over 100 of these and so would really like to get it right and to make sure the documents will be factually-correct and useful for people!
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Lucia