What BRERC Cannot Provide

BRERC receives many enquiries that are not in our remit to respond to. Some of the most common enquiries of this type are listed below.

• Reason For Designation: BRERC is not a designating authority. Therefore we cannot provide enquirers with the reason a site is designated. Sites may be designated for reasons other than purely environmental ones. We can only provide details of site boundaries, a description of the site and any other ecological data we may hold.
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• Opinions/Comments: BRERC endeavours to maintain an unbiased view towards any site or species in its area. As we work with many groups and bodies ranging from conservation groups to developers, it would be unprofessional for BRERC to widely express any opinions about a site or species occurring on it. We are primarily a central source for environmental data, and we would encourage enquirers to study the data we provide and draw their own conclusions.
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• Digital Data: For most enquiries BRERC cannot, at the present time, generally provide data in digital form due to OS licensing rules. This includes any information we may have digitised ourselves, because this is deemed to be derived from OS data.

Confidential or Sensitive Data

We give out data at our discretion but the following guidelines generally apply.

Our policy is that confidential or sensitive data is only made available to the ecologists of our four funding Unitary Authorities, the Conservation Officers of English Nature, Avon Wildlife Trust and the English Nature Species Protection Officers.

We will state if the following has been recorded in the area of your data search:

• Badger setts
• Bat roosts
• Otter holts
• Raptor or owl bird nests

For the following we restrict location details to 4 fig grid refs:

• Badger sightings
• Bat sightings
• White-clawed Crayfish
• Other endangered or vulnerable species at BRERC’s discretion
• Locations of release or translocation sites