Research and evidence
Natural England’s views and actions are based on the best available evidence and analysis. This page explains what our evidence programme is and how we gather, use and communicate evidence.
What do we mean by "evidence"?
For Natural England, "evidence" comprises scientific information about the natural environment, economics, statistics, social research, operational research, monitoring and surveillance. We will use the best evidence – the most relevant, reliable and accurate that we have available - to inform all the decisions we make. We will use evidence that we have gathered or have access to and we will show how we use evidence to inform decisions.
The generation, collection and analysis of the best available evidence forms our evidence programme.
Evidence register
Natural England’s current research and monitoring projects, designed to meet our priority evidence needs, are described in the Evidence Register. The register also includes links to recently published evidence and details of some of our work programmes that generate and use evidence, including the Species Recovery Programme, and management of our National Nature Reserves.
Evidence programme
Natural England develops the evidence base on the natural environment through work we commission and work by our staff, targeted at our evidence priorities.
Commissioned evidence. The budget for the evidence we commission through contract or support through partnership arrangements varies from year to year. This year it is £4.1m, in 2010/11 it was £7.1m and in 2009/10 £8.1m.
Evidence gathered by our own staff includes monitoring on our NNRs.
However, our contribution extends beyond this.
An increasingly important area is our influence over other evidence programmes. Key players include the research councils, LWEC
, and the Defra network. We both influence and deliver Defra’s Environmental Stewardship research & development (c£2m) and monitoring & evaluation (c£1m) programmes.Our partnerships include other Arms Length Bodies, academia and a range of organisations that we work with under Memorandums of Agreement and Memorandums of Understanding.
Evidence needs
We are currently producing summaries of evidence for all our main subject areas. These provide concise statements of what we know, what we don’t know and areas of active research and debate. They will have a central role within the new Natural England business model, providing the foundation for our thinking about our evidence needs, for the priorities in our own evidence programme, and for our efforts to influence the evidence programmes of others. We will undertake external consultation on the draft summaries, and make the final versions publicly available.
The summaries will contribute to meeting Government’s requirements that we should be evidence-based, transparent and, given serious funding constraints, maximise opportunities to work in partnership.
Evidence work areas
For specific information on a work area please see the individual subject page.
- Landscape, historic environment and geodiversity
- Biodiversity
- Marine
- People and access
- Land use
- Land management
- Ecosystem approach
- Climate change
Evidence strategy
We are developing our Evidence Strategy for the 5 years 2012 - 2017. This will provide a publicly available statement of the central role of evidence in our work. It will explain how we currently deliver evidence, where we get our evidence from and how we work in partnership. It will set out the principles for our future evidence work, and the importance of our specialist staff in this.
How we make our evidence available
We make our evidence available through a range of publications, maps and datasets. Our Technical Publications page provides information on the different categories of research and evidence publications. For links to some of the evidence published by our research and monitoring projects see Published evidence.
Evidence standards
We are currently working on producing our evidence standards. These will include:
A strategic standard that describes the principles for the way we create, access and use all types of evidence.
A series of operational standards to show how we apply these principles when we gather new evidence and when we use evidence to underpin our decision making.
