The perils of licensing invertebrate collecting

A contributor to the BWARS Facebook group recently expressed surprise that there was limited control over who collects insects or other invertebrate specimens. The comment drew attention to an important issue that I think is poorly understood.

In the UK, we don't have a single law banning insect collection except by a few privileged individuals who can fight their way through masses of officialdom (i.e. a few academics). Yes, we do have a system whereby there is a need for a permit to collect from certain land designations. There is also provision to protect certain species that are vulnerable to the effects of collecting. Fortunately, the latter is fairly light touch but there are restrictions that could cause problems where species are very similar. In addition, some landowners, such as the National Trust and Forestry Commission, do have general permitting systems.

There is also a growing question of whether collected specimens are accompanied by permits in order that they be accepted by museums? So, in fact we have quite a range of officialdom ourselves - it just that it is not unified and there are grey areas.

The drawbacks of permitting

For the serious entomologist permits can be a problem.

Until recently, I ran Dipterists Forum's summer field meeting. It is a Mammoth undertaking. At one time, these meetings tried to visit as many SSSI in the area visited. They relied on the then organiser (who was a Grade 7 in the Nature Conservancy Council) to organise all the access permissions. When the NCC was disbanded there was nobody to do this and it became increasingly difficult to run such meetings. There is a good two months’ work involved in securing access to sufficient sites to keep a team of 20+ Dipterists occupied for a week. It is not really a job that can be undertaken by a volunteer and' in my experience, it became very difficult to get help from Statutory Agency staff. I well remember spending several trips simply visiting the local offices each day to sort out permissions - so if you are paying £300 to £400 for a week away, you don't really want to spend your time cooped up in an office, ringing landowners!

The solution was to stop attempting to visit SSSI and to concentrate on land where one could secure blanket access permission: The Wildlife Trusts, Forestry Commission, National Trust and local National Nature Reserves. Hopefully that job can be done in a day - but it is still a demanding job for a volunteer. Needless to say, I lost enthusiasm for the job of running field meetings and eventually bowed out of running such big events. Finding a replacement for such an onerous job is not easy and I doubt that such meetings will carry on for that much longer.

This situation highlights a critical issue: most of the UK's biodiversity data comes from volunteers and the highest quality data come from those few specialists who do collect specimens. If we don't have a practical way of managing permits then we will probably lose access to a lot of new data and will see a decline in the numbers of specialists who are prepared to provide information to UK data users. If one looks for an analogous situation, it is worth thinking about the difficulty of obtaining collecting permits for some European countries. Do they have a wealth of data on difficult taxa? Simple answer: No! Conversely, the UK is one of the richest countries for biodiversity data, including for many difficult groups.

It seems to me that the comparison tells an important story. If you impose a strict permitting system you will lose access to data. So, the moral of the story seems to me to be that if you want information it is essential to make the system simple as possible.