We want to know what’s out there and exactly where you saw it.

To most of the people participating in The Wild Watch, it was all about getting out there and putting wildlife on the map – quite literally – with at least six-figure grid reference accuracy.

Why the precision? On a simple level, if we want to protect and enjoy our wildlife we need to know what we have and where it is – and perhaps surprisingly, we don’t know nearly as much about either as we ought to.

The where and why

Knowing where an important and vulnerable species lives is a good start, but we also need to know why it is there. If we can identify the features of the habitat that are important to it, we can manage the habitat to make sure these features are maintained, or even improved and extended. On a simple level, we know that some species depend upon woodland, others on rivers or moorland. We know that providing nesting sites can help some species, and so on. But the information is often simplistic and incomplete. Ideally, we’d like more detail.

By collecting lots of records for a species, with accurate grid references, and by searching all the habitats it might be found in, we can get that detail. This has been made possible because of the explosion in digital mapping and the development of powerful mathematical tools in ecology. Digital maps are available for many of the habitat features that are important to wildlife and increasingly accurate maps are being made available all the time.

It works like this. For every dot on the map for a species, we can use GIS (Geographical Information Systems – digital maps) to describe in enormous detail the environment around the animal or plant. Altitude, slope, aspect, habitat, land use, vegetation type, soil type, climate, and so on. We know how far it is to the nearest stream or wood. We know the length of stream in a 1 km circle around the species, the area, edge length and patch size of woods and the distances between them – the available information on habitat is huge and growing.

Mapping habitats

If we know all this for lots of points we can look for patterns, comparing the habitat around an animal with that at places where the species is not found. To cut a long story short, after a great deal of number crunching we can produce new maps, based on mathematical Habitat Suitability Models (HSMs) that predict just how good the habitat is for a species – for every 50 m or 100 m square of land in the AONB. After testing the accuracy of these maps with new data collected at new sites we have a valuable conservation tool. We not only know where a species is found, but why it is there. We know why a location may not be suitable for a species, and if appropriate, what we can do to make it better. The maps identify possible new locations for a rare species, targeting survey and conservation work. HSMs are a valuable addition to our conservation toolbox, helping us to use our resources wisely.

What do the maps look like? Well, here’s one we made earlier, a map of habitat suitability across the Yorkshire Dales (including Nidderdale) for the noctule bat. The data used to make the map were collected on walked transects not unlike those being done for The Wild Watch. As the colour changes from yellow through green to blue the habitat gets progressively better for the bat.

Habitat Suitability Map for the noctule bat in the Yorkshire Dales. Noctules prefer low-lying ground in the bottom of the dales and the lower ground to the east, including Nidderdale.

Image: Noctule bat copyright Manuel Ruedi