Yorkshire & Humber houses a number of Local Record Centres which maintain close links with the local naturalist communities and societies across the region. Species recording is also collated and managed by a number of national groups who publish their records to the NBN Gateway.
The yhedn project will provide a number of services aimed at key data producers and consumers.
This includes local record centre staff and volunteers, amateur naturalists and surveyors, statutory agencies and local authorities, environmental consultancies and developers.
The aim of yhedn is to provide services which fit in with the way people produce and consume data. yhedn works to support the principles of data exchange and availability at the local, regional and national level.
This page is designed to show the types of services which will be made available to Local Record Centres and their customers as members of the yhedn network.
This is by no means a complete or exhaustive list. New services are constantly being developed and existing ones continue to be refined.
Amateur naturalists collect a vast amount of species data and represent the experts in most taxonomic fields. Naturalist data underpins the work of the yhedn network and so it is important that we continue to support their work and - as they remain the data copyright holders - protect their interests when releasing data.
The most important service we can offer to naturalists is that their records will be stored securely, backed up and made freely available back to them. This is no small claim. Backing up data and availability guarantees can be expensive and impractical on a small scale. Providing this capability regionally allows us to make an extremely robust and relatively inexpensive service available to all members of the network.
GIS software can be very expensive so yhedn offers the ability to draw live distribution maps of species records using GoogleMaps or GoogleEarth. These can be used by both indivuduals to view their records in a wider context or by local societies producing reports and publications.
In addition to mapping services, yhedn can also offer live analysis tools which will provide additional means of interrogating data.
At the local level, yhedn is developing a number of services for Local Record Centre officers and clients. Any boundary can be quickly screened against both the holdings of the Local Record Centres and data which is made available by other organisations through the NBN Gateway.
Online data searches provide the ability to tailor the output to user requirements. Species, site and habitat data can be filtered using existing or bespoke species lists, habitat indicator species, by geographical scope or significance.
The ability to add bespoke criteria to a search means that this mechanism can be used in many different applications - Development Control, Local Development Framework Allocations, Farm Environment Plans and potentially, through using habitat indicator species lists as criteria for identifying potential new wildlife sites, nature reserves, areas of priority habitat and habitat networks for green infrastructure planning.
For corporate users with in-house GIS, data can be made available through desktop GIS applications. MapInfo, ArcGIS and other commercial GIS applications support data provision through WMS/WFS (Web Map Services / Web Feature Services). This allows users to have the most up-to-date data without having to manage regular updates. It also means that data can be viewed over in-house Ordnance Survey mapping and used in the analysis of in-house GIS content.
At the regional level, yhedn will enable the free exchange of data within the Local Record Centre community allowing regional datasets to be collated from all Local Record Centre data. These regional datasets will serve to inform strategic planning including the Regional Spatial Strategy and will allow us to have a single contract with regional organisations like Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, the Environment Agency regional office and commercial organisations such as Yorkshire Water for the provision of data.
Data will be accessible through mechanisms similar to those described above although the interfaces and the types of data made available will be different. Broad regional questions will typically require more analytical answers rather than the specific detailed data responses required for local questions for example the screening of planning applications.
yhedn will provide a rational mechanism for making Local Record Centre data more widely available through national databases such as the NBN Gateway. The regional datasets collated by species or taxonomic group from Local Record Centre data will be uploaded periodically to NBN Gateway.
By using datasets collated regionally the administration by officers at both the Local Record Centre and NBN Gateway level is greatly reduced.
As Natural England are building internal processes and applications which source data from the NBN Gateway, this will provide another route for data to get onto the desktops of Natural England employees which fits in with their normal day to day work.
