Congratulations to Steven Allain, from the School of Anthology and Conservation, who won an award at this year’s NBN Awards for Wildlife Recording 2022. Steven won the 2022 NBN Award for Wildlife Recording – Terrestrial.

The winners and runners-up of the NBN Awards for Wildlife Recording 2022 were announced at the Natural History Museum, in London, on Wednesday 9 November 2022.

These national Awards recognise and celebrate the outstanding contributions adults and young people are making to wildlife recording and data sharing, which is helping to improve our understanding of the UK’s biodiversity.

Steven has worked hard to both generate and verify records of amphibians and reptiles in Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and Norfolk since 2016 and in the last two years in Kent.

All of the records that Steven generates are shared with the local Amphibian and Reptile Groups. He is Chairman of the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Amphibian and Reptile Group, and also the Norfolk Amphibian and Reptile Group as well as being Volunteer Officer for the Bedfordshire Reptile and Amphibian Group.

Steven is often consulted by Animal and Plant Health Agency regarding the presence of non-native amphibian and reptile species in the UK, and his passion and enthusiasm for amphibians and reptiles, and his unique ways of engaging people helped him to also win the 2022 Anglia Ruskin University Sustainability Champion Award.

Steven Allain says: “The main thing that excites me about recording amphibians and reptiles, is that they are historically under-recorded. This means that it is fairly easy to discover new populations of even the most widespread species that no one knew were present in an area. For me, it is all about putting dots on maps, and trying to cover as large a geographical area as possible, to help maintain up-to-date distribution maps of our herpetofauna.”