BSG Ecology short-listed for CIEEM Best Consultancy, Mitigation and Innovation Awards 2020
BSG Ecology is thrilled to have been short-listed for three prestigious Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management (CIEEM) awards; best Medium (scale) Consultancy of the Year, best practice in (large-scale) Mitigation and best practice in Innovation.
This is the third consecutive year we have been short-listed for the Medium Consultancy Award (we won the award in 2018 and were highly commended in 2019). It is for companies that employ between 11 and 40 ecologists, and recognises high quality technical work, and our demonstrable commitment to the delivery of practical outcomes that benefit business and the economy as well as nature and/or people’s connection with nature. It also shows our commitment to the professional development of our staff through training and mentoring, and reflects our contributions in sharing learning and good practice with clients and peers, and our involvement in the promotion of ecological consultancy as a profession.
The (large-scale) Mitigation Award is for projects that that demonstrate innovative use of mitigation/enhancement techniques, promote biodiversity gain and sustainable development, and deliver value for money for the developer in the context of the project. Our submission was the Landscove Holiday Park, South Devon. To mitigate impacts associated with the redevelopment of the site on the South Hams SAC horseshoe bat population, a range of measures aimed at maintaining, enhancing and creating habitat for SAC bats were identified. Monitoring, completed over six years, has demonstrated increased foraging activity of horseshoe bats in these habitats (up to twenty times more than baseline levels in some months), use of newly-created roost features, increases in invertebrate prey availability, and continued use of all local commuting routes. The cost of the ecological inputs have been considerably outweighed by the economic benefit of the project to the developer and the local area. We were the winner of CIEEM’s best (small-scale) Mitigation Award in 2019 for our work with O&H Hampton on brownfield habitat creation at Hampton East; the project also won the Tony Bradshaw Award for Outstanding Best Practice.
The Innovation Award short-listing is for our collaborative research on the use of high frequency noise to enhance bat mitigation measures in relation to HS2. We worked with fellow ecologists at The Ecology Consultancy, noise consultants at Temple Group and academic researchers at Bristol University to investigate and test measures to dissuade bats from entering the tunnel entrances and help guide them onto new flight paths. This resulted in Natural England withdrawing a key objection with regard to bats, while the wider legacy of the work is that a mitigation solution has been developed that can be more widely applied to avoid bat fatality on linear infrastructure schemes. This is the first time we have submitted a project for consideration for an innovation award, and we are delighted to have been short-listed.
Short-listing for the three awards is a credit to the hard work, technical expertise and experience of our staff across our six UK offices. We are looking forward to attending the award ceremony in London on 2 October 2020.
Further information on the Landscove Holiday Park project can be found here: Landscove Holiday Park, Devon:Delivering Biodiversity Benefit to Horseshoe Bats
If you need ecological support for your project, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
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