Red List for Britain's Mammals Wins CIEEM's NGO Impact Award

We are absolutely delighted to announce that the Red List for Britain's Mammals has won the CIEEM NGO Impact Award 2021. 

On Tuesday the 19th of October the Mammal Society was invited to the CIEEM Awards held at the Merchant Taylor's building in London. It was a fantastic day, highlighting an array of great environmental initiatives. We were shortlisted against tough competition including with the Bat Conservation Trust's BatChat Podcast and UKHab's UK Habitat Classification, and so we congratulate them for their tireless conservation efforts. 

The Red List was compiled by the Mammal Society and the project was led by former Mammal Society Chair, Professor Fiona Mathews. Publication of the Red List would not have been possible without the help of many local mammal groups and volunteer citizen scientists. Since its publication, the findings of the project have provided a very clear basis for prioritising funding and conservation efforts for the future.

One quarter of Britain's mammals are at risk of extinction in the near future. We hope that in being shortlisted for this award we can continue to raise awareness of the Red List and highlight the urgency of acting on its key findings before it is too late. The Red List for Britain's Mammals should be seen as the beginning and not the end of the effort to secure a future for our country's wild animals. We would urge people to continue to record signs and sightings of mammals, such as hedgehogs, squirrels, foxes, rats, bats and mice, using our free Mammal Mapper app or online form. 

We'd like add a special thanks to Colin A. Harrower from CEH. He was responsible for the collation, processing & analysis of the Biological Records data that formed the occurrence/distribution data used in the Atlas, Status review and the red list. He was also responsible for some analyses using the distribution data to produce a series of distribution/range size estimates which were used to determine the historic & current distributions along with the trend in distribution over time. Distribution size and it’s trend over time are one set of criteria used in the red listing to try and determine the risk to species. For instance, species with small ranges, and/or showing dramatic declines in range are typically at greater risk. The methods used to produce these distribution/range size metrics were, from simplest to more complex, the number of occupied grid squares, Minimum Convex Polygon, and alpha hulls.. 

The Red List for Britain's Mammals has received authorisation on behalf of the International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN) at a regional level.