NatureScot

Thank you very much for joining us, Sarah.

Sarah is Biodiversity Metric Officer at NatureScot and has worked at NatureScot for a year, assisting with the development of the Scottish Planning Biodiversity Metric.

She has eight years' experience as a consultant ecologist with a focus on habitat surveys, habitat condition assessment and biodiverse net gain, and has extensive knowledge and experience in the creation, adaptation and use of biodiversity metrics in Scotland and Ireland.

Welcome, Sarah.

So how are you planning to incorporate watercourses into the metric? And will that follow a similar approach to England's BNG4 metric?

Watercourses is one of those areas that we're definitely still developing, and we really have a lot to consider with this.

We have been discussing this with SEPA, with our NatureScot freshwater advisors, looking particularly at the classification types we want to use.

But we also need to review how we approach riparian zones and the English riparian zones do differ slightly from SEPA riparian zones.

For example, the Loch Ness Centre has previously supported a £25,000 reward for anyone who can provide definitive evidence of Nessie.

Now, this does stop short of hunting and capturing her for sport, though, for even though in September 2025, Scotland's nature agency, NatureScot, confirmed that it had not created a species protection plan or code of practice for Nessie, if an undiscovered creature were found in Loch Ness, then legal protection would depend on the facts and the applicable laws, with special legislation perhaps being needed.

It is most commonly believed that should a creature ever be caught, then samples would be taken from it, and it would then be released back into its habitat, the dark, mysterious waters of Loch Ness.

So, even though despite popular stories that Nessie is legally protected, there is no special law preventing someone from hunting the monster specifically, though I would imagine laws aren't very much needed really myself, for anyone capturing or harming Nessie would first have to do it, which would be no mean feat.

And throughout the Tweed Valley period, Because of the survey that was done, we increased the culls by 300%.

When the Deer Commission changed from being Deer Commission for Scotland and it became absorbed into Scottish Natural Heritage and now NatureScot, The local deer officers in the area, such as I was myself, basically ceased to exist, and the whole interest in deer, in my view, just disappeared.

Those properties now are culling far more seeker deer than the actual enhanced culls that we proved to them were required, and they're doing that today.

And the very fact that they are sustaining a cull suggests that it's an undercull anyway.

And this was an old curling pond.

So we received funding from the Nature Restoration Fund by Scottish Government, NatureScot.

And so what we did was basically we came and we reopened this pond, restored it.

so there's a stream that runs in from one end and then there's this stream that runs out the other end and it eventually runs into the Haining Loch so it joins up there but unfortunately we've sprung a little bit of a leak so we're trying to hold some of the water back so we can raise the water level again

So it's a whole different gamut of different kind of specialist skills.

We have quite a few students who work for the Scottish government or work for NatureScot, Scottish Water, environmental NGOs.

Some stay in research, so they've stayed here or they've gone to other universities to do PhDs or maybe masters.

So, yeah, it's quite diverse.

What's your involvement in that field and how do you think it has influenced or inspired your photography?

We're under license from NatureScot.

I, amongst other people, monitor birds of prey in the hills over the winter and spring.

So that has actually developed and enhanced my photography because quite often I'm tramping up into very small remote glens, places that people don't normally go to, sometimes where there's no paths.

So that's the, we're trying to bridge a bit of a gap there, uh, to keep the interest going for the hunter to keep the cull.

They've, they've done similar things in Scotland over the last two or three years, uh, and by all accounts it's quite successful from what we've heard from our colleagues in NatureScot, for example, so it's been quite effective.

So we're gonna trial something here, too, over the next couple of months, you know.

Yeah, that's very good.

Now, I met some of the delegates in the Cairngorms when they were out on a field day.

Martin Gaywood of NatureScot gave me the lowdown.

We've just had the fourth, uh, International Conservation Translocation Conference, and basically it's, uh, bringing together specialists from around the world who work on conservation translocation.

And what that is is basically moving species for conservation purposes, things like reintroductions.