ANOTHER LIFE: Little packages that arrive now and then from readers of Eye on Nature are wonderfully unpredictable, writes Michael Viney.
They have included a big, exotically-coloured grasshopper captured on top of a Dublin bus; a bottle of sea water containing two virtually invisible, but ultimately exquisite, jellyfish, the size of one's fingernail; and a dandelion with multiple stems, stuck together as one.
Such intriguing arrivals spice a steady flow of queries about this strange bird or that peculiar beetle. To know the names of things seems an urgent part of our negotiations with other species, as if they helped to bring the wild to order.
Nationally, however, what we know of the island's biodiversity is in a considerable mess. The facts on what species we have, where they are, and what's happening to them is seriously incomplete, and scattered between scores of different government departments and agencies, universities, ecological consultants, NGOs, hobby groups and private individuals. Without an independent, software-literate National Biological Records Centre, the basic tool for nature conservation is still missing.
The Heritage Council, currently "under review" by the Minister for the Environment, Martin Cullen, is committed to promoting such a centre. It commissioned an expert study that found 84 separate sets of data, ranging from a sophisticated survey of Ireland's seabed life (the BioMar-LIFE project, accessible on CD), to the lifelong card-files and logbooks of amateur naturalists.
Coillte, Teagasc, the Central Fisheries Board, and the Environmental Protection Agency were some of the agencies with key records of species and habitats. But now the Heritage Council is embarking on a further search and audit, to include state agencies not directly involved with nature conservation, and information held outside Ireland.
To treat the two islands as one natural unit makes a lot of ecological sense. But it has meant that many naturalists have sent their Irish records to the UK Biological Records Centre at Monks Wood. The weighty New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora depended heavily on Ireland's voluntary field recorders for the Botanical Society of the British Isles. Furthermore, the Republic's ongoing neglect has been pointed out by CEDAR, the Centre for Environmental Data and Recording, in the Ulster Museum, Belfast. This agency now has more than a million records of northern wildlife species and sites, and has published distribution atlases of ground beetles and the bigger moths.
The next atlas, for dragonflies, will be based on its successful Ireland-wide survey, backed by Dúchas, which ends this summer (see www.dragonflyireland.fsnet.co.uk). But this dragonfly database was founded on a lifetime's records, built up by one Anglo-Irish naturalist, Cynthia Longfield, of west Cork.
Unlike the highly popular study of birds and bats, that of Ireland's 8,000 or so insect species figures in very few datasets. There are a handful of entomologists working in the Republic, including just one to look after the enormous insect collection in the Natural History Museum, and another in the National Parks and Wildlife Service, who regularly discovers species "new to Ireland".
A National Biological Records Centre is imperative as a tool, both of conservation and development, and as a mark of national scientific maturity. But it will also need scientific independence. Data is an intellectual property, with sensitivity about access and use: naturalists are shy about disclosing the whereabouts of rare breeding birds or threatened plants, unless they feel an absolute trust. Use of the centre's data in environmental impact studies and planning decisions also calls for a visible independence from direct government control.
Its logical home would be with the Heritage Council, which has so far taken the lead towards bringing the centre into being. The heritage officers now appointed to most local authorities were also the Council's initiative, and will now be engaged in the local biodiversity action plans required by the Department of the Environment, in order to draw up a national biodiversity development plan.
These plans need facts to work on. A National Biological Records Centre would be a key source of information and advice.
In the North, CEDAR sees its mission as offering people knowledge of their local natural history: it reaches out to schools, NGOs, community groups and a network of local recorders. This was also the dream of people like Eanna Ní Lamhna and David Cabot when they set up a national biological records centre in An Foras Forbartha, the environmental research institute, axed in the 1980s. Its subsequent neglect is a scandal, long overdue for repair.