Biodiversity Action Reporting System (BARS)
A significant programme of development is underway that will transform the way BARS operates to benefit anyone involved in planning or reporting biodiversity action. See below for more information.
Introduction
The Biodiversity Action Reporting System (BARS) is an integrated web-based information system developed in 2002 to meet the challenge of reporting against the UK Biodiversity Action Plan.
BARS is supported by a UK partnership of funding organisations led by Natural England. The system has been added to and expanded but not fundamentally changed or updated since its initial release.
BARS provided the main focus for BAP reporting in 2002, 2005 and 2008. In 2007 the UK BAP process was devolved to the four Countries. The 2008 UK reporting round followed the original UK BAP structure.
BARS v1 2002-2011 (current)
The existing BARS system is heavily structured against the original UK BAP strategy framework. This was a top down strategy and BARS was intended to offer a means of documenting biodiversity action plans (BAPs) and reporting progress against them.
The current database holds:
- country biodiversity strategie
- the national plans for UK priority species and habitats (HAPs and SAPs)
- local and company Biodiversity Action Plans (BAPs) and
- information from conservation projects.
BARS
contains data on progress with the actions and targets contained in these plans and strategies. Reports were previously submitted by plan leaders during UK BAP reporting rounds. The system does not hold survey data, but provides links through to the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) gateway, where these data are held.
Information contained in the database is available to both members of the public and registered users, although access can be restricted.
BARS Development Programme 2010-2012
In 2010 the BARS partnership, in consultation with the existing user community, identified a large number of development requirements. In the same year a programme of development began focussed on improvements to the core abilities of the system, i.e. to represent the location of individual, site based actions taken to benefit biodiversity.
This is in effect implementing a shift in emphasis from a UK BAP driven process (top down) using BARS to collate biodiversity action plans setting out work that should be done, to an action driven process (bottom up) using BARS to collate information about biodiversity action planned, underway or complete taken to achieve a defined set of practical objectives. The development programme is expected to complete in March 2012.
BARS v2
The newly developed and revitalised BARS will offer a more focussed open and effective system for entering and reporting information about biodiversity action within the UK. It will be capable of aggregating statistics from individual actions, with a particular focus on the amount of habitat and species management in place. It will be possible to filter this information by biodiversity objective and viewed spatially within interactive maps and across different periods of time.
In April 2011 a first version of New Action Mapping abilities was released. This first version offers a fully interactive map with a range of data filters, some contextual overlays and the ability to query actions one by one. The maps make use of detailed data sourced from the existing BARS database and from external databases managed by the Environment Agency and Natural England. This demonstrates a new ability for BARS to incorporate data from a wider range of sources. These early iterations usefully demonstrate the exciting direction we are moving in and we welcome feedback.
