Wildlife monitoring for environmental licensing

Since 2010 I have done fieldwork for environmental licensing in Brazil: wildlife baselines for impact assessments (EIA/RIMA, RAS, RCA) and ongoing monitoring in the environmental programmes of projects already in operation. Most of it was as an independent consultant hired by environmental consultancies; at the end, as an Environmental Analyst at Seteg.

The projects range from mining in the Amazon to a railway, a gas pipeline, a thermal power plant and wind and solar complexes in Northeast Brazil. At a port in the Northeast I was the technical lead for sea turtle monitoring, with quarterly boat-based campaigns and every sighting georeferenced.

The work runs from the field campaign to data analysis and the technical report delivered to the licensing agency. That is where “I know the data from the moment it’s collected” comes from: I know how a field spreadsheet is born, where it usually goes wrong and what the report has to answer.