This is the second edition of the Durham Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP), first published in 1999 under the title ‘Action for Wildlife'. The structure and content of the plan has changed, but the aim remains to provide a series of structured action priorities for all those organisations and individuals working to conserve biodiversity in the Durham BAP area.

Priority habitats and species have been chosen by a series of working groups of local experts to reflect the current concerns of wildlife organisations. It is by no means a comprehensive list of habitats and species under threat and is seen as work in progress. These working groups will continue to meet to develop new action plans and joint projects to help meet our targets and to monitor our progress.

The structure of the Durham BAP has been adapted so that the priority habitats and species are grouped into fewer individual action plans, with fewer overall actions. So, for example, the Magnesian Limestone Grassland Action Plan covers not only our concerns, objectives and proposed actions for magnesian limestone grassland, but also for northern brown argus butterfly, cistus forester, chalk carpet and least minor moths. We hope this will make the DBAP a simpler document to follow, with a more realistic array of actions for the next 5 years.

The other major change is that targets focus exclusively on the extent and condition of priority habitats or the range and population of species, rather than on what we have done. In other words we are setting targets for the outcomes rather than our outputs. Monitoring these outcomes is not going to be easy, and it is sometimes hard to see where we will find the resources to do so, but this kind of monitoring is the only way to measure the success of our combined activity prescribed in the DBAP. Where baseline information is not available, gathering it is often our first objective.

In order to measure changes on the ground it is clearly important to have usable habitat definitions and an objective view of a habitat's condition. To this end the DBAP includes a series of definitions for the purposes of mapping priority habitats and measuring their condition. Where possible this draws on work already undertaken by English Nature and DEFRA and elsewhere in order to avoid unnecessary duplication. However where definitions were not already available they have been written, and where adjustments were needed to meet local circumstances, they have been made.

Since 1999 regular reporting rounds have ensured that we have a record of all the partners' activities towards the original plan objectives, and the highlights of the first five years of work are set out in the publication ‘Action for Wildlife five years on'. Our working groups will now collate all reporting of activity against our objectives and actions on the Biodiversity Action Recording System (BARS) website (www.ukbap-reporting.org.uk), which is open for all to view.

It remains for me to say that the printed version of this document is a snapshot of the biodiversity action planning process, and that the most current version will always be on-line at www.durhambiodiversity.org.uk. As the DBAP is a living document we would welcome your feedback at anytime.

Andy Lees
Implementation Officer

andylees@durhambiodiversity.org.uk