News

PAA awarded position on SSSI National Monitoring Framework

PAA is pleased to announce that Natural England has awarded the company a position on the ‘Framework for Common Standard Monitoring (CSM) SSSI Invertebrate Assemblage Assessment’. This four year contract means that PAA is part of a team that will be invited to assess the condition of SSSIs and other wildlife sites in England, by investigating the invertebrate assemblages. Our highly experienced surveyors could be asked to assess any of the 480 SSSIs and 758 other important wildlife sites throughout England.

Would-be contractors were asked to ‘bid’ for ‘lots’. The lots refer to different habitat types and PAA put in a bid to be involved in eight lots. This required PAA to provide convincing proof that we have the in-house expertise to do the job. The habitat types include short sward grassland, open water, salt marsh, fen, acid mire, seepage areas, rivers and sandy beaches. We were successful in winning all eight.

The survey work will follow a standard sampling protocol and use ISIS, a computer application developed by Natural England for the recognition and scoring of invertebrate assemblage types. Site data will be fed into ISIS, which can then score each assemblage type according to its conservation value. The data will help in the condition assessment of SSSI sites that takes place at least every six years.