Bats: How to make the most of so many new guidelines without drowning

Last autumn saw the release of three sets of information: the fourth edition of the Bat Surveys for Professional Ecologists: Good Practice Guidelines, the second edition of the UK Bat Mitigation Guidelines and a revision to lighting guidance that takes bats into consideration. Together, they provide nearly 500 pages of new and updated information.

In this webinar, RSK Biocensus Director Paola Reason will give an overview of the various guidance, with a focus on the UK Bat Mitigation Guidelines, and will provide insights on how developers and environmental consultants should work with these documents.

Paola has been an ecological consultant for nearly 30 years... she spent most of these at one company before joining RSK Biocensus in 2019. Whilst at Bristol University as a post-grad, she started working with fruit bats in the Comoro Islands, perhaps not coincidentally along with other current members of RSK Biocensus... (you can see descendants of these impressive Livingstone’s flying foxes at Durrell Zoo). Now she works on rather smaller UK bat species.

Paola is a Chartered Ecologist and Fellow of CIEEM, and a member of Natural England’s Bat Expert Panel... She is on the Technical Review Board for the Bat Survey Guidelines and was the lead author of the UK Bat Mitigation Guidelines (alongside Stephanie Wray). She is a member of Infrastructure and Ecology Network Europe (IENE)’s Scientific and Expert Committee and (to her great surprise) recently made the ENDS 2024 Power List as an influential environmental consultant.