Scotland's environment blog

The Habitat Map of Scotland is very pleased to be able to make publicly available a substantial amount of new habitat data for woodlands and freshwater.

In this blog, we’re shining a light on, and celebrating, some of Scotland’s most dedicated volunteer rainfall observers, who have been actively recording rainfall data, every day for decades – some dating as far back as the 1960’s. This is extremely valuable data to record in all weathers – even during the dry spell that we’ve had recently.

The world wide web has revolutionised how we communicate, find and use information and data.  In celebration of the launch of the world wide web twenty-seven years ago on 23^rd August, this is the second of a two part blog that is shining a light on the web team that brought Scotland’s environment web to life.

The world wide web has revolutionised how we communicate, find and use information and data.  In celebration of its launch twenty-seven years ago on 23^rd August, this is the first of a two-part blog that is shining a light on the web team that brought Scotland’s environment web to life.

The Riverfly Partnership is a network of organisations working together to protect and conserve the river environment. These organisations represent anglers, conservationists, entomologists, scientists, water course managers and relevant authorities. This UK-wide initiative provides a simple monitoring technique that counts the abundance of freshwater invertebrate animals to detect changes in the quality of river water. Using volunteers, the project helps to expand environmental monitoring capability and can act as a deterrent to would be polluters with the regular presence of regular volunteer sampling. John Clayton, a Senior Ecologist at the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA), tells us more.

Saturday 21 April 2018 was World Fish Migration day, a global event to create awareness of the importance of keeping rivers free from man-made barriers to fish migration. In Scotland, we know of hundreds of man-made barriers that are preventing fish from accessing essential spawning habitat in our rivers. But it’s likely that there are many more out there that we don’t know about. To help us identify where these barrier are, we have developed a barrier recording ‘app' that can be downloaded to a smartphone and used to help us to help the fish. Here you can also find more information about this project and how to get involved.