Information on the biodiversity in Wales is held in the millions of reports collected by the Local Environmental Records Centre Wales. These reports contain the name, place and date/time where individual organisms are recorded.

There are four record centres in Wales, our local centre being the Biodiversity Service for Powys & Brecon Beacons National Park (BIS) which is based in Brecon. The staff at BIS kindly extracted a species list from all of the reports made in the area around the proposed Garreg Fawr Energy Park. A map of the area used and the list of the species are presented in an Excel spreadsheet, downloadable here.

The list includes 17000 species, giving the year of the earliest, latest and total number of records for each species. The most recent reports of several hundred species are out of date, being from more than 10 years ago. Others, such as the hedgehog, which we know to be present are not listed.

This AME group project encourages supporters and all interested persons to make new records of any and all species they encounter in the wider areas.

The current diversity records can be accessed at https://www.bis.org.uk or directly at https://aderyn.lercwales.org.uk.

Aderyn is the software to look at maps of records of all Wales. To add your new records (photographs are useful as evidence) there is an App called WiReD (access via https://record.bis.org) to simplify the adding of records.

We have also added a group to our AME WhatsApp specifically for this project, through which we will be pleased to hear of your sightings and for help or advice in using the relevant software. Do contact us if you would like to be added to this group. Also, if there is demand, we will pleased to facilitate on-line or face to face training on the process.

Of course while there is direct relevance to the Garreg Fawr proposals, improving the data available on local wildlife will be useful and beneficial for other reasons too.

Please contact us if you require further information about this initiative.