It’s been a busy year at Thomson Ecology Cardiff and infrastructure has become our bread and butter. We now have a team of ten ecologists, eight of whom are PTS (Personal Track Safety) certified to work on our large scale rail projects.
As part of our work with ABC Electrification on Network Rail’s Great Western Route Modernisation project we have carried out surveys of over 80km of railway. Our work has included 260 man days of watching briefs for breeding birds and reptiles, bat inspections of 82 structures (including bridges, buildings and tunnels), assessment of 12 badger setts, 12 Section 28H agreements to apply for consent from Natural Resources Wales for works within SSSIs, Phase 1 habitat surveys of 30 proposed compound sites, great crested newt (GCN) surveys of 15 waterbodies, and water vole and otter surveys covering more than 23 km of bankside habitat.
We have also carried out surveys on a large scale highways project. Our work to date has included deploying static bat monitoring devices at 50 locations yielding 770 nights’ worth of data and identifying more than 100,000 bat calls, GCN eDNA surveys of 400 waterbodies, installing more than 500 dormouse tubes, and climbing to inspect 37 trees for bat roosts. In addition, we have spent 93 man nights on bat emergence surveys of high potential trees and 41 man-days of bird surveying – with more to do.
Phew what a year! We’re looking to forward to continuing with these projects in our new 2015-2016 financial year.
