Essex Wildlife Trust, Essex Biodiversity Project and the Environment Agency have been working in partnership to share information about Essex rivers. As well as generating data on the current state of river corridors in Essex, Essex Wildlife Trust was given access to historic river corridor survey data from the 1990s, consisting of detailed sketch maps, botanical surveys and summary data for the Rivers Pant and Blackwater in north-east Essex. This data was collected by the National Rivers Authority and is now held by the Environment Agency, all in the form of paper records.

In 2014 the National Biodiversity Network received funding from the Cabinet Office via the Release of Data Fund to mobilise datasets that were in need of digitising. As a result of this funding Essex Wildlife Trust Biological Records Centre was able to digitise this historic data and upload it to the National Biodiversity Network Gateway. Following the closure of the Gateway these datasets are now available to access via the NBN Atlas under a CC-BY-NC License (Creative Commons, with Attribution, Non-commercial v4.0).

In 2017 Essex Wildlife Trust Biological Records Centre received almost 30 boxes of data from Colchester Museum, amongst which was a National Rivers Authority dataset for the River Colne and tributaries, including Salary Brook and the Roman River. In early 2018 we received funding from the Environment Agency to digitise this dataset and upload it to the NBN Atlas. This data is also available to access under a CC-BY-NC License.

To access more information about these datasets via the NBN Atlas click here.

If you require these datasets in a different format, or would like permission to use this data for commercial purposes please contact us.