Bernwood Bats Licence & Monitoring Project Highly Commended at the CIEEM Awards 2025

We’re delighted to share that our work on the Bernwood Bats Licence & Monitoring project was Highly Commended at this year’s CIEEM Awards 2025, under the Best Practice Knowledge Sharing category.

In 2021 Pell Frischmann was appointed by EKFB to undertake a seven-year programme of bat surveys, monitoring and analysis, reviewing the potential impacts of a section of HS2 on local bat populations, alongside assessment of proposed mitigation. These impacts include loss of roosts, disturbances from noise, light, and vibration, reduction of habitat, and severance of flightlines.

In 2022, it became clear that additional impacts could be experienced in the immediate area of monitoring, which had not been fully considered as part of the Environmental Statement. In parallel, there has been a growing understanding that the assessment of noise impacts on bats had not been fully considered by both bat ecologists and noise specialists.

This award highlighted the work undertaken in 2022 by Noise Consultants (part of Logika Group), to fulfil the project’s needs, whilst addressing this gap within the industry. Unweighted noise measurements were carried out of a range of construction activities within a set frequency range 8kHz-80kHz and at setback distances between 10m and 40m. The results were presented as a series of graphs showing dB experienced at different frequencies at different distances. The data was formally published by CIEEM in the Bat Mitigation Guidelines in August 2023 and has been actively shared widely in different formats since.

In the past, mitigation has sometimes been overly restrictive and/or expensive, so not beneficial to bats and detrimental to project costs and programme. This has largely been because of collecting noise data, which is not applicable to the way that bats perceive noise levels, and a precautionary approach. The data collected under this assessment will immediately improve the assessment of disturbance impacts on bats from noise, allowing smaller projects to consult this data where project-specific data is not available, and outlining a methodology for larger projects to collect unweighted high-frequency ultrasound data to anticipate changes in bat behaviour.

The benefits are industry-wide and will enable researchers, consultants, statutory nature conservation bodies, and planning authorities access to data to enable evidence-based impact assessments. It will allow for greater value for money across the industry and will result in better, more cost-effective mitigation.

We commend all teams involved and are proud to see our work positively influencing the HS2 project and contributing to the development of industry best practices for bat conservation.

On being Highly Commended, our Project Manager, Juliet Archer-Reeves, said:

“I’m incredibly proud to be part of the project team and the innovations in the industry it has tangibly contributed to, both for the betterment of this project and those to come.“