Staff profile

Mammals include species of ecological, economic and cultural importance. In Britain,the badger is a particularly unusual case, because it is both protected, as the subjectof specific legislation (the Protection of Badgers Act 1992), and persecuted, in acontentious approach to controlling the transmission and incidence of bovinetuberculosis. Despite the high level of public interest arising from theseapparently contradictory factors, the abundance and distribution of badgers – likethose of the majority of terrestrial British mammals – have not been intensivelymonitored at a national scale. Most of what is known about the dynamics of thenational badger population comes from three major national sett surveys conductedover the past four decades. Although these represent vast coordinated efforts, theirlow frequency and indirect nature (i.e., surveying setts, rather than badgers) makethem a blunt tool for assessing the factors that drive the abundance and distributionof badgers. For that to be successful, sustained and widespread monitoring would berequired. In 2023, the Badger Trust launched its State of the Badger Project toproduce a comprehensive report on the status of the UK badger population, threats,and recovery. To assess population abundance, the Badger Trust is exploring waysof applying a citizen science approach to data collection.Recently, the People’s Trust for Endangered Species launched a pilot of a NationalHedgehog Monitoring Programme (NHMP). The NHMP recruits groups andorganisations concerned about the fate of the hedgehog. Each contributing groupagrees to adopt one or more sites of c. 1km2, and to survey that site annually for 30days. Surveys involve the deployment of 30 camera traps on a systematic grid.Camera placements are distance-calibrated using a standard method, sothat the captured images can be used for density estimation.

Given the protocol used for the NHMP, there is no reason why the data collectedcannot also be analysed to provide information on the occupancy, density andecology, more generally, of the badger. Furthermore, the methodology complementsexisting and proposed approaches to badger monitoring, such as sett surveys tomeasure social group abundance and social group size counts. Given the sharedinterests in citizen science and wildlife monitoring there is enormous, unlockedpotential in integrating the efforts of the range of groups recruited to the NHMP withthe badger interest groups in the programme to produce mutual benefits for bothhedgehog and badger enthusiasts. This project will focus on working with the BadgerTrust to recruit badger groups to develop and assess their survey protocols andincrease the spatial coverage of the surveys. Thus, the aims of this project are:(1) to extend and increase spatial coverage of the NHMP through the recruitmentand training of badger groups, to enable them to conduct surveys;(2) to extract badger data from across the NHMP surveys, conducting analyses ofoccupancy, density and activity in relation to local environmental characteristics;(3) to assess the robustness of inferences derived from simultaneous sett surveys,together with extrapolations from estimated group sizes [4]; and(4) to assess the value of ad hoc sighting data (e.g., from iRecord and iNaturalist) forinferring occupancy and relative densities of badgers, alone and in combination withcamera trap data.