London’s open spaces and urban greening features are surveyed for a variety of reasons: to inform local development plans and green infrastructure strategies; to determine and review planning designations; to evaluate and ensure no net loss of biodiversity during development; to plan and monitor net gains for biodiversity from development; or for land management and biodiversity conservation.
GiGL manage and curate London wide datasets that collate information from such surveys including: Sites of Importance for Nature Conservation, Open Spaces (and Public Open Space designations), habitat survey records, urban greening features (including green roofs).
GiGL are developing services to support biodiversity net gain (BNG) data management, monitoring and reporting. We are working with partners to establish data standards and data flow best practice, which will ensure information from BNG surveys are reflected in GiGL’s centralised datasets, giving then an ongoing legacy and independent data management. These data will inform new GiGL services for consultants and contractors and we hope the resulting income generation will allow GiGL to address survey deficiencies within London. Our ambition is to fund a rigorous species, habitat and green infrastructure survey and monitoring programme for Greater London.
Collecting and reporting site survey data
GiGL can support surveys by providing access to data or reporting for the survey area. Please contact us if you are commissioning surveys and would like to access GiGL baseline data and share the resulting data with GiGL.
Ecological expertise and local factors will dictate the most appropriate methods for a given survey. However, GiGL can recommend data management standards or considerations for the survey design and outputs that will increase the onward use of the resulting data. We can schedule any follow up work, such as providing maps for reports or Area of Deficiency modelling. Please see our survey data standards and guidance page to access GiGL’s suite of guidance documents tailored to specific survey types, outlining recommended data standards and resources available.
If you anticipate publishing maps that may include GiGL derived data, please contact us for more information on licensing and permissions.
Once the survey is complete, GiGL can incorporate local results into the London wide datasets on behalf of the data owner, providing data are collected to suitable formats and quality.
For more information on how GiGL can support surveys with existing data and on submitting new survey data, please read our Site Surveys Guide.