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Webinar - Preparing for Biodiversity Net Gain 3.1 with Land App
Webinar - Preparing for Biodiversity Net Gain 3.1 with Land App
Simla Rees-Moorlah avatar
Written by Simla Rees-Moorlah
Updated over a week ago

Summary

  • Webinar about Biodiversity Net Gain and Land App's new functionality for quantifying Biodiversity Net Gain potential.

  • Agenda includes discussing the growing ecological need and new Land App functions.

  • New functions include the UK habitat best guess Baseline and drafting a management plan.

  • Second half of the webinar focuses on new reports.

  • Release of the Biodiversity Net Gain Metric 4.0 by Natural England.

  • Potential future tools like the England Woodland creation offer Checker are mentioned.

Transcript

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Land Apps webinar for biodiversity offsetting. For those that I haven't met, I'm Dan, and I'm the Innovation and Partnerships lead here at Land App.

The agenda for today is really focusing on our growing ecological need within the country and our new functionality that helps ecologists, farms, and states quantify and start estimating their biodiversity unit potential. We've got a couple of slides introducing you to the principal, and then we're going to dive into four main functions of the Land App. One of them is our new UK habitat best guess Baseline, which is a way of automatically receiving a UK habitat map for any area of interest in the country, which includes Scotland and Wales. Then, how you can use the Land App to draft a management plan, a spatial scenario of what that land wants to become in the future. We're then just going to introduce a couple of the new land use workflows we've built, namely the e-planner data from UK CEH, and if there's time, our upcoming Forestry Commission suggester as well.

In the second half of the webinar, we will be looking at our new reports dashboard, which automatically quantifies the biodiversity unit uplift from your baseline to your land management plan. As a note, most of the things I'm showing today require a subscription within the software, so you won't be able to do biodiversity offsetting within the free product. However, during that survey, we will ask a specific question about whether you want to be in touch with more information, including a quote.

As mentioned, there are 15 minutes at the end for Q&A, so please do ask any questions that you've got. First thing just to say, on 24th March, Natural England released the biodiversity metric 4.0. The documentation is live; we've had an initial look and we will be hoping to update our existing calculator to match sometime in the spring. But very much for today's webinar, we're going to be focusing on biodiversity 3.1. There is a guidance document about the changes, and I've had a look; there are no significant changes to the way that numbers are calculated. However, there are a couple of additional habitats and a couple of habitat types that have been split out that we will endeavour to get into the system as well.

Firstly, welcome to anyone who's not completely new to the Land App. Who we are is a geospatial mapping platform used by rural professionals across the country. We're really trying to put the right data in the hands of the right people, including data from third-party providers. over the last five or six years, we've really built our library off the back of a number of data providers looking at designations, habitats, market incentives, and more. We try our best to keep all those data up to date, so much so that every single data is now fed by our internal system. That means that if yesterday any of these data sets updated, by today, you should see that reflected within the Land App. We're going to be looking at a couple of these data sets in particular because some of them do inform the strategic significance of your biodiversity offset scheme.

Just also wanted to say thank you to our partners and thank you for the feedback you've given up to now. We're very grateful to be amongst a great set of research bodies, universities, estates, land agency firms, ecological surveyors, etc., that really do feedback a lot of suggestions to us. This whole demo is off the back of a demand that's come from the sector, so we're really hoping that we build a tool that's useful to you, but also, we're looking forward to working with some new faces as we go forward.

Just to touch on four key rules that we're going to be kind of relying on for this demo is that first, within Land App, always create a red line boundary before you start. That red line boundary just defines the site area, and I'm going to show you how to create that, and I'll come on to the naming in a moment. For example, name that boundary underscore site name underscore surname, such as Smith.

The second one, which is really important, especially if you're going to be using the reports dashboard, is please name your maps consistently. We promote the fact that you want to use a template type, certain site name, then surname, template type, for example, being a baseline habitat assessment, and then the name of the site and then surname. It's really important that you, especially as your portfolio grows and you're working with multiple landowners or sites, just naming those maps just makes it easier to search for them and appraise them and download data specific to those as well.

The third rule is that we really want to promote you to just having one authoritative Baseline habitat map per site. that's one data layer that shows the absolute truth of what's happening on the ground, which includes your conditioned scores. And for biodiversity offsetting, that needs to be at least a level three code in UK Hub. And when I say level three code, that means it's got at least two letters, so G4 being modified grassland, but most of them are level four, so G2A, for example, lowland calcareous grassland, will generate units, but G grassland will not generate units. I'll touch on that again during the demo. if you're looking at your biodiversity units, just make sure you've assigned the habitat codes far enough into the classification.

And then the final rule is just only data that's published, i.e., in your map, you've published it to your map of maps, will it then be showing on your dashboard. But again, I will cover that. Just one final point around the UK Hub, we're not going to be doing a UK Hab training during this webinar. It's potentially something they would like to do in the future, but today I'm going to assume you've got a basic understanding of UK Hab and the classification that underpins the biodiversity metric. An example list of the codes required for biodiversity units is here. We've got the full list that we can share, but you will need to go, you can go to the Natural England website or ukhub.org to get a fuller list. But you can see that all of the codes in the right-hand panel have got mostly a minimum of three letters, apart from G4, modified grassland. That's how far you need to go down the classification before you can calculate units. Just by saying "grassland" or just by saying "cropland," there are no units associated with that. It's the further defined.

We have been showing this scheme schematic for all the other webinars. We're getting some good feedback, which is just, "What does good look like in the Land App?" The Land App has multiple different project or plan templates, which force you down a certain workflow. before you're starting mapping, understanding what template you need to use because the outcome you're trying to achieve is quite important. For today's webinar, we're going to be focusing on three of them. Ownership boundary will be the start, just how do you create a red line boundary defining your area of interest. We're then going to go straight to a UK habitat baseline using our baseline habitat assessment template, which is what's currently on the ground as of the day of surveying. And then the other template we're going to look at is the Land Management plan, which is the proposed future habitats that you're either creating or enhancing. by the end of the demo, we should have three layers: the red line boundary, what's the existing habitats, and what's the future of that area going to look like? Where are you going to create new ponds, create new woodlands, plant new hedges, etc.? Also on the schematic, just notice the nomenclature. How we've named those plans, plan name underscore farm or site name underscore surname, just keeps everything nice and clean.

We will get towards the end of this session be showing a live demo of a biodiversity site, but what I wanted to do is just explain the principle with an actual case study that's happening on the ground. This is our Founders Farm Tim's Dan in Surrey. He's been working with Finance Earth and Surrey Wildlife Trust and Farm Ed to design a biodiversity offset scheme, and they are now they're now ready to trade. The process has been, firstly, creating a baseline, so a digital understanding of what's currently there in the language of UK Hab, and they've been working with the Wildlife Trust, who's actually taken that best guess that I'm going to show you in a moment and gone and ground truth to it. Once you've got that baseline, they've then drafted the Land Management plan, which is a spatial scenario of what they want to do next, including a bit of agroforestry design, they've done a bit of horticulture, I think they're doing some grassland restoration as well. Both of those data layers are then being fed into our biodiversity offset calculator within the dashboard, which summarizes the total units generated by that process of moving from baseline to that management plan, which can then allow you to start calculating some high-level numbers. For example, the team in Surrey are looking to try and achieve £25,000 per unit, and Tim's Family Farm is generating around 100 units through this process, so we're getting circa two and a half million across the 35-hectare farm. That's what they're aiming for, and we shall see how the trades go. However, the final step before you do that is you really need some business insight into whether that biodiversity offset scheme is financially worth going down because obviously, the two-and-a-half million estimation is just the take in. You've got to also think about how much spend is going to be needed to actually get to that point. we have been working with the Wildlife Trust and a couple of other providers around a proxy calculator for the cost of restoring that grassland or the cost of establishing that agroforestry design. Only then can you actually work out whether it's financially viable to go down those units.

Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to now move across to firstly demo building that boundary, and that boundary will be. I'm going to start on our development environment because I want to show the first bit of new functionality, which is our best guess baseline. I'm hoping I've got a new map name there and create a new map. For those, by the way, that haven't got a Land App account, should have said we're at thelandapp.com, so if you go on thelandapp.com, you can create a free account in there, and there's some training and guidance videos to get to this point.

Once you're in the Land App, the first thing you want to do is define that site boundary. we're going to, for the next 15 minutes, we're going to design a hypothetical situation for a farm that I know fairly well down in Surrey that will allow us to understand how the tool itself can be used to calculate biodiversity units.

So, the first thing is to find a location. I'm going to search the map with a grid reference, rather than a postcode this time, which takes me zoomed in to an area of the country. For the demo, I'm going to be using Ordnance Survey Lite, which is just one of our base maps. There's a couple of others that might be useful as well, such as satellite, sorry, aerial imagery that I might come on to a bit later. But just for now, just for defining the area of interest, I'm going to use the grayscale OS.

Once you've got that area, the first stage to building a boundary is hitting "New" at the top left, and then you can choose "Use Template." This will upload and provide a splash screen for all the different templates that we've got within the Land App. Today, as I mentioned, we're going to be focusing on Baseline Habitat Assessment, Land Management Plan, and the other one, which is the ownership boundary, and I'm going to start there by clicking "Ownership Boundary." You're then asked which import method you want. For initially the demo in England and Wales, I'm going to choose "Pick from Land Registry."

Now, this loads all the polygons for in London Wales that are registered on their HM Registry database. I can then choose which polygons I want to create my boundary on by just clicking on them. It automatically will select all titles that match. if I click on one polygon, it's selected a couple of others in the map that are also tied by the same title number. Just for the demo, I'm going to choose the areas that I'm confident are part of the farm like so, hit "Next," and give it a name. I'm going to call it "Ownership Boundary" and finish. I've now got a boundary, and that now tells the Land App where my area of interest is. The first step in the process that I want to trigger.

Yeah, and there's a couple of steps in this, but the first thing is I'm actually going to buy the Ordnance Survey MasterMap data for my area of interest. The reason for this is this is the authoritative dataset that underpins all planning applications, government applications, and even the same dataset that people like the Rural Payments Agency use as well.

You can access that by hitting "New," "Buy Data," and the first dataset at the top, which is called "MasterMap Topography." You can then define your purchase area on your plan. I'm going to choose my ownership boundary and give this a name, which is "Slade's Farm" like so. And that is then met with a quote. This quote is for your license to purchase the OS MasterMap, and that lasts 12 months for you that you can renew in 12 months' time. Hit "Buy Now," and call it "Slades" like so. We call that non-billable, and what that's done is now the Land App has taken the red line boundary, it runs that data through our database to Ordnance Surveys, and it should then serve all my farm, everywhere that the OS knows that there's a different feature. I'm just going to spend a moment looking at that quickly.

So, I've got my boundary that's defined. I've now purchased the OS MasterMap, which is now all of the different vector features that make up that boundary. if I zoom in, you can see that I've got all the different buildings I can click on and look at the area, etc. And you can change the units, for example, so I can get building plan areas, areas of ponds, etc., etc. And what that gives me is an initial assessment of how this farm, how this area of interest is broken down. However, at the moment, this is just in the language of Ordnance Survey MasterMap. This is just saying where there's agricultural land, it does pick up where there's mixed woodland, it does pick up where there's different types of woodland such as this one that's a natural environment C, but you can see I'm getting at least a high-level breakdown of what's happening. But for your Biodiversity Unit calculation, being in the language of MasterMap isn't going to be enough for you to calculate those units.

So, what we've been developing over the last 12 months in partnership with a number of great stakeholders is that we can take this MasterMap package of data and we run it through an algorithm that we're calling the "Best Guess Baseline." It firstly takes each of those MasterMap shapes and compares it to a number of different data sets. For example, we look at the Ancient Woodland Inventory, it looks at the Priority Habitat Inventory, it looks at the National Forest Inventory. it looks at all these different data layers, and it's going to, on behalf of me, pre-populate my map with where those areas are. And the second thing, which is just as important, is it's going to take each one of these agricultural fields and it's going to compare it to the satellite data from the last five years. we can temporarily assess each field, identify whether it's cropland or grassland. If it's cropland, when was that field last bare, and also if it's grassland, when was it last seeded, i.e., is it temporary grassland or is it permanent grassland?

To trigger that, the same principle as I just did before, I'm going to hit the "New" button at the top left and hit "Buy Data," but this time I've got a button called "Best Guess Baseline with Earth Observation Data." Now, when I define my purchase area, I need a valid OS license, and so I'm going to use my Slade Farm biodiversity offset, which then will then calculate the price for my farm. for example, for the best guess Baseline for this one, 195 pounds. You need an OS license to purchase the data; however, the data is a perpetuity license, so once you've purchased it once, you don't need to renew the best guess Baseline moving forward. The reason for that is, as you're going to be improving this data, there's no way that we can produce a better guess as you've already added your own assessments. You can, however, obviously refresh it if you want to update satellite data. I'm going to hit "Buy Now," and again, it's going to call it "Slides," and what that's doing is exactly the same principle as the master map. It's taking that master map data, it's sending it through the algorithm, however, because it's got to check about 13 different data layers, it's going to take about five minutes to be ready. I'm just going to leave it to render in the background while I show you a couple of other features while that's working.

The first thing I wanted to show you is the Priority Habitat Networks layer from Natural England. It's one of the layers that we're using to inform our biodiversity offsetting. our biodiversity offset calculator includes the multiplier for strategic significance, which can either be 1, 1.1, or 1.15.

The assumption that we've made, and I've got a summary slide that I'll show you at the end of the webinar, is that if the area of interest intersects either in an enhancement zone (orange) or is an existing habitat type (green or beige), it gets the multiplier of 1.15 because it's in a strategic significance area. If it's in the enhancement home zone 2, it also gets the multiplier. If it's outside of a zone, i.e., the bits that are not within the networks (greyer areas and areas with no data), it just receives a multiplier of 1.0. That is just our assumption. Obviously, if you're doing an assessment yourself, you can change the multipliers that you use, and the way that you do that, and I'll show you a bit later, is you can export the table of data and import it into the official Natural England tool, but I'll come on to that in a moment.

I'm just going to check whether the data is running and just confirmed that I got an email. yeah, just to show you, when I'm running the best guess, I've got an email from Land App that shows me an estimation of how long it's going to take to run. In this case, I'm expecting it to be ready in just under nine minutes, so we shall get an email once that's ready.

That's the habitat networks layer. The other layers that are obviously going to be useful to you are looking at other targeting such as flood zones. I'm just going to put my boundary on before I start designing an arbitrary plan, just showing some of the key layers that help you understand what this farm might want to be focusing on. They've got flood zones down to the West, so it might be that looking at the Land Management Plan and looking at the habitat types in this area, I'm going to try and slow the flow, try and reduce agricultural runoff, etc.

Other data layers that are really important are the triple SI layer. Just a reminder, you can't do any biodiversity offsetting within a triple SI, so always turn on that triple SI layer and make sure that you don't have any within your site of interest. That is being handled by the Dashboard, which we'll show you later, but just double-check that you're not trying to create biodiversity units within a triple SI.

The final thing I wanted to show you before my best guess will hopefully arrive (and this is always the exciting bit of doing a live demo) is that with that OS data, you can generate a high-level report that summarizes, just in the language of Ordnance Survey MasterMap, what's the breakdown of the different features within your estate. For example, if I go into reports at the top right, I hit "Add Plan," I can now summarize the OSM area for Slade's Farm. Hit "Done," and that will then break down using Ordnance Survey's MasterMap, the farm by the unit area, both in terms of how much hectarage it covers and what percentage of the total area that is as well. at a high level, you can get quite a nice breakdown of how much mixed woodland to scrub to natural area there is, for example, and how many different buildings you find within the area of interest.

The other layer that you can look at as well is the data layers. I've obviously just shown you toggling on Triple SI, priority habitats, and flood zones, but you can create a report by going into the data layers and running your ownership boundary through a data layers report, which intersects all of our different categories or individual layers of your choosing, including the habitat type, for example. And this will then run a report which you can call it "Demo of how much of my site area is within a designation," "is within a priority habitat area," etc., etc. Just hopefully, this will take no more than 30 seconds. I want to show you the output of this as well because when you're biodiversity offsetting, there's quite a lot of data layers you've got to look at. By generating this report, it gives you a really quick understanding of that site and how much of that site intersects certain things. For example, the area that I've defined has got just over a kilometer of public right-of-way. It's in which parish, which local planning authority it's in as well.

Remember, if you're going for biodiversity offsetting, a lot of that is relevant to the local planning authority. this farm, for example, needs to interact with Waverly local planning authority. Other criteria that we probably won't have time to look at, but for example, there are other avenues to find funding for specific habitat types. English Woodland Creation offer, for example, for woodland creation and the targeting layers are within here, so you can see that 42 hectares of my farm is within the high spatial priority area of UCO. As a note, we will be releasing to our users a UCO tool in England Woodland Creation tool, hopefully Easter weekend, but if not, in early May, and that will just show you based on an SBI number what the priority areas are for your Woodland Creation grants.

Okay, so I'm just going to check the process update and see how that's getting on. While that's running, it's still going, so it's going to be another three minutes. I just wanted to move across to just understanding the principle of building a Baseline and a Land Management Plan. As I've mentioned, there are two main data templates that we're using. We're using a Baseline Habitat Assessment, which is the understanding of the existing habitats you've got in the language of UK Hab. Within here, you'll be able to assign condition assessments and secondary codes. And then there's the Land Management Plan, which is exactly the same template. They're pretty much replicas of each other. The Land Management Plan is reflecting what is happening next. that's the Future Vision for the farm. When you're using the UK Hub, just remember that the biodiversity offset codes you use are really important to be. It's really important that you use the right level of classification. just by saying "grassland" isn't enough. You do need to say whether or not that grassland type is modified, neutral, calcareous, etc., because this is taking slightly longer than I wanted, I'm actually going to move over to the demo farm, and then I'll show you how they create that. I was going to do it the other way around, but the process is still building in the background.

So, this is the Norney Farm demo that I just explained. What they've done is they've got a red line boundary, and they purchased the best guess Baseline. you can see that the source data, the best guess Baseline for Norney Farm, looks like this, which is when it's served, it's a grassland map of the authoritative area like so, of where the grassland is, where the different polygons that make up the buildings are, but also any additional habitat information, such as where the priority habitat layers are, as well. What then they did at Norney was they took that Baseline and they gave it to the Surrey Wildlife Trust, so the Surrey Wildlife Trust took that data out and surveyed it. they basically walked the farm and tried to understand where is that best guess Baseline correct and where is it incorrect. And that then, when they confirmed and amended it, looked like this. the main difference between the best guess Baseline and the source of truth, the ground truth data, was that there's actually an area of field that the best guess Baseline thought was grassland where it was actually temporary grassland. We have since tightened up the demo since tightened up the output from that best guess, and now we're starting to detect, and hopefully, I'll show you one when the data comes through on the other map, that we can temporarily see when that field was bare, when was it last ploughed, or when was it last seeded. That allows you to have better context ecologically. Just to show you, once the data is in the map, you can easily update, confirm, and amend it by clicking on a shape and hitting the "Change" button for the primary habitats. within our Baseline Habitat Assessment template, there's a number of different codes that all match the UK Hub. Just to reiterate, only codes with at least three letters will provide that biodiversity unit, with the exception of modified grassland. you can click on a shape, hit "Change," and you can say what you want that shape to represent, like neutral grass and calcareous grass, etc.

I'm not going to edit too much of this, but you can also see I can add a condition score. at the moment, I'm on the Baseline template. I can add a baseline condition to that map by clicking on the shape and choosing from the dropdown list. As a note, one of the assumptions we make in the calculator is that the Baseline habitat assessment, unless otherwise stated, is moderate. That just gives us a data point for us to calculate the units for the entire Farm. Even if you haven't done a full condition assessment on top of that Baseline, the team has worked together and built a Land Management Plan.

I can see my best guess data is ready, so we'll go over to the other map in a moment. But just to finish off this demo, they then, on top of that Baseline, have drafted a Land Management Plan of all the different habitats they want to create. They've done that by drawing an agroforestry design in this field, turning that legume lay into an agroforestry design. They're also looking at doing some grassland enhancement, as you can see by the Baseline. This one being a modified grass field, and then they're actually trying to turn it into other neutral grassland. They're trying to change the habitat type and improve the condition from, I think it's poor at the moment, and they want to go to moderate. That is in our head what good looks like for a map for biodiversity offsetting. You've got a baseline habitat assessment that's been confirmed and amended by clicking on the shapes, and then on top of that, you've drawn a Land Management Plan about what you want the habitats to change.

One key point just to show before I go and demo with our new data that's just arrived in the map is that for areas where there is no change, i.e., you don't want to change the condition or create a new habitat, you don't need to have any data in. you can see between the gaps here, there's no data in that area, and the reason for that is we automatically, when we do the calculation, clip together the Baseline and the Land Management Plan. Where there are no Land Management Plan features, we assume that the Baseline has continued, i.e., nothing is changing on the ground. Okay, now hold that thought on this demo. I'm going to go and look at the data that I've just been served, and we will dive a bit deeper into the biodiversity unit calculation for this particular map.

In a moment, I'm hopefully going to refresh my page, and for my area of interest, I've now been given a Best-Guess habitat map. what I've received from my boundary that looked like this, I've now received a UK habitat layer that gives me a UK habitat code for every single one of those features that you find within the farm. The green represents grassland, orange represents cropland of different types, and purple is scrubbed, plus a couple of other ones. The first thing just to show you is that with those agricultural fields, the Ordnance Survey data just called it all agricultural land or beige, and our best guess Baseline now has differentiated between where there's permanent and temporary grassland and where there's cropland. The way that it's done that is it's taken that boundary, looked at that particular field parcel, and it's gone to an earth observation dataset, the Sentinel dataset, and asked it what the probability of that field is being grassland, and it's returned 79. it's saying that this field was 79% confident as a grassland field. These fields, the ones that are dark orange stripe, it's returned a slightly different result because it's saying it's temporary grassland due to detecting bare soil in December 2022. we're getting that temporal element that even if you're in the field as an ecologist, you might be missing. You may not know when that field was last sown. It's beginning the temporal element as well. Other things we're getting from the Earth observation is, for certain arable fields, was their winter cover as well. you can see that this one is saying that the field parcel did have a winter cover from November through to January. The flip side of that is that we have a bare soil patch, as we did over here, for the key months that really do impact water quality and flood risk, etc. this dataset hopefully also helps you identify areas of the farm or your client's area that could be improved in terms of the arable landscape.

Once you've got the best guess Baseline served to you, you can confirm and amend it. The first thing, remember I said, is that you've got to ensure that the UK Hab codes are down far enough. At the moment, we just don't have the tech capability to really differentiate between the grassland types, so you will need to do that using the Land Apps drawing tools. you can hold shift and click on many and hit change and choose the grassland code. I know those ones up there are modified grassland, so I'm just going to put in G3 C, which is under neutral grassland. That will generate some units as well. You can add condition assessments, so I can say that this grassland is in good condition, and then all of the other modified grasslands, for example, are in poor condition. I've now just en masse applied or to all the modified grass and good to my neutral grass, and you can obviously be a bit more specific in that.

Once you've got your Baseline, what is really key is to draft that management plan. Remember on the farm I just showed you, they had an agroforestry design; they showed where they wanted to plant a new woodland. I'm just going to spend five minutes explaining how you do that within the Land App. The first thing is you choose your area of interest. I'm just going to look at that habitat layer again quickly and identify an area in a strategic, significant area. Which, you know, along this, maybe this bank is out intersecting that area. I remember that flood zone that I spoke about earlier, so these two fields are going to be my area of interest. I can have a look at being imagery as well if I want to check what's happening on the ground, but I'm happy that this one is temporary grass and this one is a modified permanent grass. Those two fields then can be highlighted by holding shift, so I've held shift and selected the two polygons.

I'm now going to copy them to a new plan. That new plan is going to be a Land Management plan which is representing a future scenario for this farm. Land Management plan slates era my farm and my name, and what I've done just to show you is I basically just brought over those two polygons of interest. Those are the only two polygons that I want to start bringing into my biodiversity offset scheme.

What I can do with them on here is I can then say what I want those fields to become. for example, if this is a temporary grass in clover but I'm actually interested in turning that into Woodland, I can then just assign it a woodland code like w1h, other mixed Woodland. The same for this modified grass field, potentially I want to, I don't know, let half of it scrub over along that Woodland Edge. I can split the area off like so by right-clicking on it and choosing the split tool. Then I can say I want half of it to become mixed scrub, and then half of it I'm going to try and improve the grassland to a neutral grassland and try and move that into good condition. Okay, so quite a basic plan, and obviously, this is just me playing hypothetical. Obviously, people out there will at this point be working with the farmer or know the site well, but I've now got two layers. I've got my best guess baseline or my habitat map, which is what's currently on the ground, and I've got a Land Management plan, which is where I think the habitats can change. These are my target areas, both in terms of habitat creation, and there's a bit of habitat enhancement in there as well.

The one other thing I wanted to show before I get onto the dashboard is that we've actually built in partnership with some stakeholders some workflows that can auto-suggest to your area of Interest where you might be in a priority area for certain habitats. But what I want to just quickly demonstrate is our new one with CEH, so the Center of Ecology and Hydrology. That is accessed through the buy data as well, but this workflow is free. you can see we've got this e-planner by UK CEH, which is free. By clicking on that, you're requested to choose your area of Interest. I can choose my ownership boundary, which we've already defined. I can give it a plan name like slides, and for this workflow, you do need an SBI number, so this may not be relevant to everyone. Once you hit buy now, we're just sending that boundary through a workflow again, and it should return for me by different datasets of where this particular site is in a priority area for Woodland creation, Wetland creation, pollen pollinator habitat, bird seed mixes, and wet grassland restoration. I'm hoping if I refresh, I have now been given, for my site, some indicative areas of where I want to target, and you can see they've been loaded on the left-hand side as different layers.

What I want to do is look at my Land Management plan that I've just drafted and just check with CEH's data whether they are in areas of high priority. for example, pollinator mixes which suits quite nicely me doing a bit of grassland restoration here, we're in a high-priority area, so you can see just to turn that off these green patches represent where the model suggests is high priority for pollen. that works quite well. Water Resource protection is where you want to increase the vegetation cover, and again, looking at my Land Management plan, I'm trying to do that in both these sections. a bit of Woodland planting is definitely ticking that box, and then the scrub, scrub, and grass restoration as well. you can see that those spatial targets are definitely focusing on areas that I've looked at already, and you can learn a bit more about what these datasets entail on our website. We're going to be releasing a bit of a guidance document either today or very soon. I hope that gives you some indication. Also, worth noting that we've got some other ones that are on the pipeline, in particular, the England Woodland creation offer Checker.

Over to biodiversity unit calculations. basically, for me to calculate biodiversity unit impact of this plan, I need to do two things. I need to firstly publish the two data layers that represent my Baseline and my Land Management plan. to publish them, I need to click this little black tick like so, and what that's now done is that has now told the Land App that those are the two layers which are ready to be quantified within the dashboard. That also will publish them to the map of maps, and if you want to learn more about Maps, I'd look at the farm cluster webinar that we did last week or the week before. Okay, so you want to publish those, and the second thing, at the moment, is there is a 12-hour delay, although we're working on improving it, between that data appearing on your dashboard. basically, I think it's 8 PM and 8 AM, the dashboard does a full refresh of all your data, so I will have to wait either till 8 PM to see the impact of this or as I've previously discussed is I'm doing a bit of a blue Peter moment where we've got a plan already in place that I wanted to show you.

Now, the biodiversity capabilities, so we've got a baseline, this is what's on the ground currently, and we've got a Land Management plan. We have now released our reports dashboard that is accessible within this menu icon at the top right of the screen and accessible under reports. if you click reports, that will open up a dashboard, and again, just in blue Peter fashion, I've got one pre-loaded. Okay, what this dashboard now does is this summarizes everything within your organization that has been published. everything that you see within the map of maps is available within this dashboard, but the main additional benefit you get from this dashboard is it starts to quantify the impact of your map of maps. for example, here's a little cluster of farms that we've been working with around Tim's Family Farm. I can start to see the total hectare edge of each of those different individuals. You can see the total breakdown of my organization's basic payment and Countryside Stewardship and Baseline habitat assessments, and I can start to infiltrate the data. The ones that are relevant for the biodiversity offsetting are the Baseline tabs. I open up the Baseline tabs; this is now just showing me the data that's relevant to my Baseline habitat assessment. in total, I've got 22,000 hectares of Baseline habitats mapped to my estate in my organization, but I want to actually just look at Tim's farm. I just want to look at that demo farm that I was just showing you. I can turn off all of these maps and just turn on Naughty Farms' official Nat cap map, which is what they're working on at the Surrey Wildlife Trust. By doing that, that is now just rendering from the database just all the data that's relevant to that file map itself, which will also impact my biodiversity unit calculation in a moment. I'm hoping this will render; see how it goes. You can see that these are the individual Maps themselves, and the reason we've got the unique ID there is that there is a chance that you both name that two of you in the same organization name the plan the same so that just keeps the unique ID just keeps them separate as well.

Let's pray for rendering and see along this should take no more than a moment, but with live demos, just while we're waiting, I can see there are some Q and A's that are coming through. If there are any questions, do pop them in the Q&A or have a quick look at the Q&A function to see if there are any there that you want to upvote, so to speak. I'm going to just work out why go for the Bold refresh, go for the refresh. Bear with me or was there always the risk of a live demo. That should refresh my plan. Okay, so we're going back to Baseline; I'm showing the latest filter it from in here. Let's just get rid of when it's got so much data going through. 22,000 hectares, it can let's go to NatCap map picture of that cap out as soon as that renders here, we are. Okay, great, so I've gone to my I've now just filtered it for that one Farm. I'm then going to just quickly show you the Baseline tab, so it's now updated my dashboard, and it shouldn't now try and render all the other datasets that were slowing it down, so that's just see how that works. There we are, perfect. what that's done is that's now rendered the map. We need to zoom into the farm. You can see I've now got a just a digital understanding of what's currently on the ground and the ratio, for example, of land use.

Just looking at the Baseline, the future dashboard does a very similar thing, which is basically like if that management plan was put in place, what would be the impact in all these different metrics? The breakdown of condition assessment that you've assigned, for example, and the breakdown of those habitats. The main tab I wanted to show you, though now we're finally there (apologies for that), is that we've got this tab for biodiversity. This is now rendering and calculating the biodiversity units of that plan that we've just seen on land app. it's filtered by Norney Farm, which is one holding. The total hectarage going into a biodiversity offset scheme is 19.81 hectares, of which is delivering 105 biodiversity units.

Just to talk through this dashboard as best I can in the next five minutes, before we go on to Q&A, the results that come out of this are firstly an on-site Baseline. This is looking at your Baseline habitat assessment, only the codes that meet the requirements of the UK Habitat Level three plus, as I mentioned before. Total hectarage, the distinctiveness of those habitats, which is predefined by Natural England, and the score of that and then the condition assessment as well. as I mentioned, if you don't put in a baseline condition, everything is assumed moderate.

The Strategic significance for this Farm is pretty much everything intersects that habitat Network's combined layer. you get an output Baseline units. You then go down to look at the Creations. This is now looking at the Land Management plan, what different habitats are being created on that farm. Again, same principle, looks at the different layers, strategic significance, and condition, but it also takes into account the time in which it would take to generate that unit, i.e., how long does it take to create that habitat, and that multiplier is automatically assigned. For example, a woodland, although we've got four hectares of woodland, according to Natural England's calculations, it takes over 30 years for that woodland to reach its unit potential, and therefore it's got a multiplier of 0.32, which gives it a total unit for that woodland block of 8.9 biodiversity units.

You then can sum the total biodiversity units created, so we're creating 175 units in this farm within that Land Management plan. And we're also then looking at how many units can be created just by enhancing existing habitats. These are all the areas for which we are moving between moderate and good, so they're trying to promote the habitat condition of some. They've also got one where they, for some reason, there's a poor in there as well. But we then get the sum of the total units created and the total units enhanced. And then to calculate the unit difference or the uplift, you minus one from the other. you minus the total post-intervention from the total Baseline, and you get the total units. You don't need to worry about that calculation for now, but that automatically happens on your behalf.

As I mentioned, you may want to play around with the numbers on this calculation, i.e., you may want to change the Strategic significance or just focus on a specific habitat type. We then recently added the ability to download this page either as a PDF report, so you can send it to your clients, for example, or you can download it as a CSV file, which allows you to download, say, the creation table like so. And that then can be copied and pasted into the biodiversity offset calculator by Natural England. you've then got a formal way of exporting that data from our tool and putting it into your tool yourself to then play with the numbers. That's all accessible through the download button.

And I think for now, the final things I just want to show you before we come to Q&A, and I'm conscious we are nearly over time, is just those assumptions I've just discussed. unless edited, we assume the Baseline habitat is moderate, and unless edited, we assume the Land Management plan is in good condition. Then Strategic significance, we are assuming that if you're in the natural habitat, Natural England's habitat networks combined priority areas, we assume you're given a multiplier of 1.15. This then just gives you that overarching calculation number, but you can tinker with the results, you can tinker with those numbers to get a more accurate one, but we're hoping that the process of buying a best guess Baseline, designing a Land Management plan, and getting the output data from the biodiversity tool gives you a nice simple way, just within half an hour, to be able to assess a new client's land and start designing up a scheme without having to spend too much time on the ecological surveys to start with. Obviously, if the value, like Tim's Family Farm, looks great, you can obviously then commit to buying and going down the ecological survey route, and you'll already have a data set that they can improve.

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