tNCEA_England Ecosystem Field Survey Coordination

The requirement is to mobilise and schedule surveys from multiple contractors to deliver England Ecosystem Surveys consistently, and to high quality, according to Natural England’s field protocols. The requirement is to mobilise and schedule surveys from multiple contractors to deliver England Ecosystem Surveys consistently, and to high quality, according to Natural England’s field protocols.

The contract would run from January 2026 – March 2028 The tasks required by the Survey Coordinator are as follows: • Project management of survey coordination including high-level schedules (GANNT), and close management of RAID. • Procurement and contract management of suppliers to deliver surveys. This must be done working collaboratively with Natural England and Defra to ensure transparency and value for money. • Ensure surveyors deployed by contract suppliers have the appropriate skills and experience required by NE. • Ensure surveyors complete comprehensive training prior to undertaking surveys (materials, online sessions and in-field training schedule all provided by NE) • Develop survey schedule taking into consideration specific access requirements (access permission information provided by NE) • Write to landowners to confirm when surveys will take place • Manage logistics for deployment, management and collection of equipment between NE, and survey contractors. • Manage in-season changes to the schedule • Communicate with survey contractors and individual surveyor teams to resolve problems and provide feedback to improve delivery • Track and manage the completion of surveys, including data submission and soil sample logistics with the laboratory services procured by NE separately. • Manage dependencies between surveys, ensuring information about surveys (access information details & changes, plot decisions etc.) is being used appropriately.

More information about the NCEA (Natural Capital & Ecosystem Assessment) Programme    The UK Government has set world-leading ambition on protecting our natural assets, internationally through the Convention of Biodiversity and domestically via the ground-breaking 25 Year Environment Plan. Intrinsically linked to the successful delivery of Net Zero, protecting our environmental services has never been more vital.

Achieving these goals is underpinned by the provision of systematic and robust evidence. For the first-time, Defra are developing a programme to deliver up-to-date, England-wide environmental data to allow for agile policy making grounded in the best available evidence – to truly understand where we are and where we need to get to.

NCEA is a transformative programme to understand the extent, condition and change over time of environmental assets across England's land and water environments, supporting the government’s ambition to improve the environment within a generation. Natural England (NE) is one of several delivery partners in the NCEA Programme alongside Forest Research, Environment Agency, Joint Council for Nature Conservation and Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.

The Programme is led by Defra as part of the Governments Major Projects Portfolio. Natural England is the Government’s adviser for the natural environment in England.

We help to protect and restore our natural world. As part of our science and evidence activities, we are delivering several projects for the NCEA, the most significant of which is the England Ecosystem Survey.

England Ecosystem Survey (EES) is an ambitious new method of collecting environmental data. The aim of the EES is to get a true understanding of the condition of England’s terrestrial environment and natural capital assets.

To achieve this the survey will collect data on attributes of extent, condition and connectivity relating to habitats, vegetation and landscape features and landscape character, as well as soil physical and chemical properties and soil and water biota eDNA. It will also collect data to support Natural England’s earth observation programme.

Change will be assessed through repeat surveys on a five-year cycle. There are three different types of survey, each of which takes place in the same sample of 1km monad squares, so a second key requirement is to manage the dependencies between the different surveys, and the laboratories that receive samples, to ensure there is alignment of the resulting data.

Three types of surveys take place in each field season (delivery year) on a random stratified sample of monads selected by Natural England: • Vegetation and landscape (V&L) – surveys required on 500+ monads per year: average time to complete each survey is between 1 and 7 days for a surveyor team of two (average 3-4 days). Survey season from May to September. • Soil sampling and assessment – surveys on the same 500 monads (but likely fewer due to dropouts after V&L): average time to complete the survey is dependent on number of plots but usually 0.5 to 1 day per plot, and 3-4 plots average per monad, surveyor teams of two.

Survey season from September to March. • Soil classification – numbers of surveys TBC but will be a sub-sample of the 500 monads: surveyors can work alone but require soil specialist knowledge. Survey season from May to March.