Good morning, everyone. Thank you all for joining our Estates webinar today. We'll be looking at understanding how you can manage an estate using the Land App. For those of you who haven't met, I'm Dan Geerah, the Innovation and Partnership Lead here at Land App, and I will today be taking you through approximately one hour of all the different functions that can help you as an estate manager or as an estate team start planning for the future.

The agenda today is really to look at a bit of best practice for a couple of key functions and then also give you a bit of an understanding about what else we do in this space, including some updates on what future functionality is coming. So, we're going to be looking at naming your Maps, making sure they're formatted correctly, how you can build an accurate estate boundary using our various data layers, how you can then take that estate boundary and purchase Ordnance Survey Master map, which is the authoritative data set for the whole of Great Britain. You can then split that boundary into your various tenancies and in-hand farming Enterprises, and we'll also cover a couple of other features such as our rural payment agency import function, which allows you to import data directly from their database, and some other functions as well. Note that we'll be demoing a mixture today of free functionality (so stuff available in our free software) but I put an asterisk where there's a subscription required, as well as a noted Q&A at the end. please do pop any questions you have in the Q&A functions throughout, and I think we have activated the voting system, if there's a question that you do want answering, please do feel free to vote it up as it comes through.

This is the third webinar in March. The other two webinars, the introductory training and facilitating Farm groups, are now both on our YouTube channel. I'm assuming that during this training session, you have at least a rough understanding of what happens within the land app, but if there's anything you need to get any points you need to go back and look at, I'd recommend going to look at those two webinars in particular.

The Land App itself prides itself on its data, and I just wanted to share a couple of slides on just some key partners and some key sources of information that we rely on. The first is our various data providers from government agencies to research bodies. We host a number of different data sets within the software and make it as easy as possible for you to be able to toggle those on and off and see where you do and do not intersect all those various layers. They cover designations, habitats, and Market incentives as well and a lot more. I will spend a brief moment going through those in the app, but definitely one of the first things I'd recommend doing if you haven't before is just logging on, creating an account, and having a play with all the different data layers we have. We keep these up to date live, which means that every night we just go and check whether any of these providers has updated their data set, and if they have, we do a full refresh, which means that within 24 hours, you should expect to see all the data updated within your Land App map.
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Okay, we also pride ourselves on our partner network. We've got a huge variety of users, partners, and organizations that regularly contribute to the Land App, and we're very grateful for all the advice and wisdom that they provide. We definitely wouldn't be here without all of you, thank you. That includes a number of key estates that we're really proud to work closely with. And obviously, if you're a new estate coming to us, we'd love to see your logo on this list too.

Before I dive into the demo, I just wanted to spend a bit of time going through some key rules for estates, both in terms of best practice and also in terms of how your maps should look once you start building them within the Land App ecosystem. The five rules that I've written down here, just for takeaways, are:

Have a single authoritative map that contains your ownership boundary for the entire estate. We do see often that people have multiple maps trying to represent the same thing. So, try to have a single map called "Master Map" or something like "Manor Estate Smith Master Map" that just contains that red line boundary for everything under your ownership.

As you start using the Land App more and more, you will create more plans, and that's natural. But what we really recommend is that you start using our folder structure. Folders enable you to file away any important layers or documents that you no longer need to clutter up your map. I'll touch on that later. For example, you could have a folder called "2022 Claim" which includes your basic payment and maybe your Countryside Stewardship claim as well.

One of the key ones in the longer term is to make sure you're naming your maps consistently and your plans consistently. I've got a structure that I'll show you on the next slide, but the rule of thumb is just to make sure that in the map name, you've got the template types you're using (e.g., Countryside Stewardship CSS), the farm or estate name, and then, if you are dealing with tenants or more devolved data sets, feel free to put in the surname as well. It adds to the structure.

When defining your boundary, try to use both the Land Registry and, if applicable, SBI number. So, if you're in England, use your SBI number as well. The reason for that is that it gives you the widest breadth of authority. The Land Registry covers all of the buildings and maybe undeclared woodlands, for example, and then your SBI number provides you with quite nice granular field parcel data for which you can create your plans.

When working with a contractor or tenants, create a separate map. So, rule number one was to create that authoritative Master map. If you're wanting to collaborate outside of the estate or maybe with new members, create a separate map, upload data into that map, and therefore, you can have this second area where you're not sharing everything, but you're just sharing what's relevant to that contract or that tenant.

We've created a bit of an infographic for estates on what good could look like and how your map can be laid out. We're going to be talking through a couple of these templates during the session. But, for example, at the top, we've got the ownership boundary, which is just a red line boundary of what's under your ownership, and we've named it "boundary_estate_name." We're releasing a new template soon, but for the meantime, I'm going to be demonstrating the ownership management plan - how you then divide that ownership boundary into the various components, where's your in-hand land, where are your tenancies, where's all your different rights, etc. The structure we're trying to promote is that each one of these plans represents a workflow, represents an end-to-end process, either defining a boundary or defining where your existing tenancies, leases, sales, etc., are, all the way down to Countryside Stewardship and your habitat baselines as well.

We will be sharing this infographic with everyone at the end of the webinar, don't worry about taking too many notes. And obviously, the session is being recorded as well. Today, I'm going to be focusing on three of those templates. Firstly, how do you define that ownership boundary, how do you then break it up into the various management components, and then how do you start drawing up some estate infrastructure as well. I'm just going to take a pause and move across to the layout. So, there are quite a few of you on the call that are new to the Land App. very briefly, we're at thelandapp.com, and you can Google us by searching "Land App." You can come and create a free account by hitting the "Join for Free" button or the "Sign Up" button at the top right. Once you create an account, you should be able to log in and start creating some maps.

I'm going to start by showing you a map of an estate, Cholmondeley estate up in Cheshire, with which we've been working quite a lot in the last number of years. I want to show you the two key layers I'm going to try and build today, you can see visually what that looks like on the Land App interface.

The first thing is an ownership boundary or an estate boundary that's clean. You can either have it as a red line that goes around the outside or with a bit of fill, and that can be changed using the styling button on the top right. We can change the style, make the fill completely transparent, or add patterns and stripes, etc., if we wish. The ownership boundary itself contains data such as the total area of the estate, which is just shy of 3000 hectares. Also, the red line boundary allows you to look at where the estate is in relation to other data layers. For example, you can see if the estate is in a designation such as triple SIs by turning on those data layers. Multiple data layers can be turned on to gain insights into the estate's position in the landscape. You can also zoom in on the map using the mouse scroll wheel or the zoom in and out function on the left-hand side.

The second layer is a tenancy plan, which is a breakdown of that estate by all the various management components. It includes different tenant types, such as farm business tenants, agricultural holdings, easements, forestry, etc. We provide you with the tools to start clearly and authoritatively building up these types of plans.

Now, let's move on to a new map and start building it up. Go back to my organization page, then go to the top right and hit "New." Let's call it "Demo Estate Map" and change the tag from "Cluster" to "Estate Management."

I'm going to create an empty map, and that will drop me in the middle of the country, which is over Birmingham. The first thing I need to do is find the location of my farm or estate. I'll use a postcode and enter it into the search bar at the top of my map, which will allow me to zoom into the area of interest, which is Cholmondeley estate.

I can change the base map; at the moment, we have the license-free OpenStreetMap by default, but I can change it to Ordnance Survey grayscale or Ordnance Survey color, or even to other layers like satellite imagery or aerial imagery. Today, I'll use the grayscale layer, which looks cleaner.

If you're on the free software, you'll need to pay for Ordnance Survey credits as you browse the map. However, with the professional subscription, you can access the Ordnance Survey data Hub if you're eligible. That means if you provide tenancy advice or have purchased your OS license, you can access that area for free, including the printing element.

Now, let's start building a Redline boundary for part of the estate. To do that, I'll click the "New" button at the top left and choose the "Use Template" option. This opens a splash screen of various templates, and for this demonstration, I'll choose the "Ownership Boundary" template.

Next, I'll be asked how I want to create that ownership boundary, and we have four main options. I'll be showing you the land registry workflow. The other options include importing a single business identifier directly or importing a file from a GIS software if you're transitioning from another platform to Land App. There's also the option of bringing in existing data within Land App.

For now, I'll choose "Pick from Land Registry," and this will load the polygons representing the registered land in my view. These polygons are outlined in pink. I can select them by clicking on them, and if there are polygons with the same title number, they'll be highlighted as well. I can toggle off that rule if needed and select individual polygons. For this demo, I'll create a boundary with this title number and a few others.

Once I'm happy with the selection, I'll hit "Next" and give the boundary a name. Following the infographic sheet, I'll call it "Troll Estate Boundary" and finish the process.

Now, the polygons from the land registry have been brought over to my plan layers. These are interactive shapes, and I can click on each of them to find out more information about that particular polygon, such as its area, title number, and Inspire ID.

If you want further ownership information, you can access that through the Land App professional subscription.
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Once you have your plan, the first thing is to create that authoritative boundary. Double-check the areas of interest and see if there's anywhere you might want to potentially edit, add, or move. A common question is how to tidy up little fragments of data and make it look cleaner. You can start by right-clicking on a polygon and selecting all polygons. This will highlight everything, and then you can change the styling of that polygon, either by improving or increasing the opacity or fill.

To tidy up areas that may not be as tidy as you want, you can use the drawing tool. Click on the polygon you want to adjust, hit "Draw" at the top left, choose "Area," and draw an arbitrary shape over the features you want to fix. Then use the "Subtract" function to iron out that area. This will remove any artifacts or errors in the data. Once you have the clean area, you can select it and merge it with other polygons, if needed.

Another way to tidy up the area is by merging polygons together. You can hold the "Shift" key on your keyboard and select one or more polygons to merge them. This will turn multiple polygons into one, creating a cleaner ownership boundary.

If you find that you missed an area of land that is under your ownership, you don't need to go through the "New" button again. Instead, you can turn on the data layer that represents all of the ownership information. Go to the top right and click on "Data Layer." Look for the category called "Ownership," where you'll find Freehold, Leasehold, or other data from the registry of England and Wales, as well as the Register of Scotland.

So, I turn on Land Registry Freehold, and you can see it then loads up all those polygons we looked at earlier. I'm actually just going to change my existing boundary from red to a slightly different colour we can see the difference. There we are, blue is what I currently have in my boundary, and red is what's outside.

Let's say, in this example, I want to include this Woodland block as well in my boundary. What you can do is select it, right-click on it, and hit "Copy to Plan." Once you've copied it to a plan, you can bring it over to your ownership plan. Now, when I go to turn off the Land Registry Freehold, I'm left with that polygon because I brought it over to my ownership plan. Just to show you that one more time, turn on the Freehold data, find the polygon or polygons of interest by holding shift and then right-clicking. I'm just going to take these little ones, right-clicking and bring over by hitting "Copy to Plan," choosing ownership, and hitting features. Turning off the layer, and you can see all those different polygons.

The final thing I just want to show you, just a little trick: if you want all of them to be coloured the same, you can see that these ones aren't coloured that blue. What you want to do is first select one of these blue polygons and then hold shift and select the other ones. Go into style, and then you can just touch the opacity, and the opacity is the fill is then filled into those additional polygons as well.

Okay, that's you building a bit of a plan. The other thing that you may want to do is add some labels, but I would firstly just quickly move over to the tenancy planning before I do that. To create that tenancy map, what I want to do is create a duplicate of this ownership plan. The way I do that is I hit the three dots next to the ownership layer, go down to "Duplicate," and this time I want to create an ownership management layer. As a note, in our product updates, we're releasing soon an ownership management layer, which will be hopefully in the next two weeks, and I'll discuss that in a moment, but for now, keep it in the ownership boundary, ownership management, and hit "Create Plan." What I've done is I've now created a replica of that ownership layer that's on top of my existing one. you can see I can toggle them on and off on the left-hand side, but this will now give me the freedom to start colouring in and labelling all of these different components to represent my different clients, all my different tenants, or my different leases.

Select I'm selecting on one polygon, for example. I've obviously got the title number there, but I can add a name, and that name could be "Tenant One" and that could be "FPT On Business Tenant." Hit "Show on Map" and hit "Accept," and what that does is that now is labelled my polygon with "Tenant One FPT." I may also want to change the style I can start to differentiate between them as well. So, let's just say "Tenant One" is a slightly pink colour. Just to repeat that with this block, select it, go into the name and edit, and call this "Tenant Two Aha." Show on Map, click, and then change the style as well to yellow. You can see that we're building up that tenant plan nice and easily using the drawing tools that you've got available to you.

You might have multiple polygons that represent a single block. So, let's just say, I put in these two. They are in a sporting lease. Again, I've held shift on my keyboard to select one and select two. I can then, for both of them, edit and say that's "Sporting Lease One" and hit "Show on Map." It's labelled both of them at the same time, and again, I can style them, and maybe for a sporting lease, I want to add a little black hash on that as well. you can then start to build up those sporting lease plans as well. You may want to merge areas together. So, just to find my final point on that building that management plan is, I've selected these two. They both could belong to an in-hand farm. In-hand farm one, show on map, but instead, before labelling them independently, I may want to merge them together by hitting this merge button at the top. That has then created a single polygon that I can give a colour to, and again, just tidying those artifacts.

Just to reiterate, just to make it clean because we do see it quite often, like so, draw the polygon over the top and subtract, merge them together as well. you can see you can then get a clean layer while I've been labelling those and changing the name on the right-hand side, the name of those polygons should be available on the left-hand side.
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So, I've got lots of polygons I haven't named, but if I wanted to, for example, zoom to tenant number one, I can click on the name in the list, hit the three dots, and I can zoom to tenant number one as a feature. Thank you, that hopefully will give you the at least the basic skill set to start building up an ownership boundary.

There are a couple of other things you may want to do, just to quickly show you. You may want to split polygons in half. So, let's say that this top section is coming out of this tenant, moving across to another tenancy. I may want to right-click and hit split, and I can split those areas. I'm just going to do it very arbitrarily at the moment. I'll show you how to be a bit more accurate in a moment. And then you can move that tenon out of tenant 2 by changing the colour and changing the name as well. Let's go to "Factor In Hand" and say that's on the "In Hand" now, in hand, well like so. Okay, I basically now just split an existing polygon into two, and that lease is now changed on my map.

Building that management, building that confidence to use it, you can then obviously build up a nice picture. Also worth saying, if you're collaborating with many people on the map and you've got your tenant plan as you want, you can lock that project by hitting the lock plan on the left-hand side, which means if someone comes into the map to try and edit tenant one, they click on the shape, but they can't edit, they can't change the color, they can't change the name, they can't split or merge it. Once you've got those components, as mentioned, we would recommend, especially for estates, purchasing the Ordnance Survey MasterMap data.

The Ordnance Survey MasterMap data is the authoritative data that underpins this base map that you can see. However, by purchasing the data, you won't get access to the actual shapes of the data, like the buildings and the building areas and the field parcel outlines, but you also get access to free prints for your area of interest as well. The way that you do that is you go into the new button at the top left, you hit "Buy Data," and you're then met with these different data sets that you can purchase. The one I'm referring to is "MasterMap Topography Layer" by Ordnance Survey.

You can hit that, and then you're asked to define your area of purchase, which in this case is my ownership layer, Cholmondeley estate. You'll then ask the intersect setting, "cut features" means that there will be a hard end to the polygons along the field boundaries, or you could do "whole features," which means that you're given all of the entire polygon or line. for example, if I bought with whole features and there's a road going through, I'd be left with a fuzzy edge because I'd probably get that entire road going out there. for most estates, we'd recommend going "cut features."

This can be a demo. Once you then put your estate in, you're then met with a quote. The quote can be dynamic, and it depends on where you are in the country, but it's calculated on your plan. Just as a note, you can actually purchase the data for a frame instead, and that then just calculates the price of buying that frame depending on where it is in the country. You can see it's dynamically updating that quote. The demo I'm just going to use the plan "Ownership Boundary." I then hit "Buy Now," and what that does is that just gives a pop-up message for you to confirm that purchase with the quote, the area, and the price. For our professional users, you can also assign a job code. So, say you're either handing this off to the accountant or external clients paying for it, you can give it a job code, and then you can define whether it's billable or non-billable. Those tags just come out of your monthly accounts report, which I won't be showing today, but there's definitely guidance on our website.

Once you hit "Buy Now," what that does is that then tells the Land that your license has been activated. We activate a license for you. We also send your boundary through a workflow that is just in a moment when I refresh, going to hopefully serve the Ordnance Survey MasterMap shape or too many. to take another five seconds before I refresh, there's, yeah, oh geez, I hit the wrong button there. I'm just going to hit refresh rather than trying to do a shortcut and be smart, and you can see now what I've got is I've been served OSM area and OSM labels. What that's done is that is now taking that fairly crude boundary that we created and given me all of the features from MasterMap that make up that area of interest.

I've now got the field boundaries, I've now got the building footprints, and within the building footprints, you can see I've got detailed areas of how big each feature is as well. This data is the authoritative data that you need for planning applications and for any other authoritative rights. if you are, say, applying to your local authority, purchasing the MasterMap gives you the authoritative shape for you to then submit to them. The other benefit of buying the OS MasterMap is you can generate a report for that estate, and I'm going to be doing that by hitting this report button at the top right, hitting "Add Plan," and then choosing to summarize my OSMM area. Cholmondeley estate. This is then an instant breakdown of your estate by all the various MasterMap codes. This is a schedule of what's contained within your Redline boundary, both the total area and the total number of all these different features. in my arbitrary area, I've got 270 buildings, which take up to 3.83 hectares of my estate, and you can see all these different codes, including the natural environment.

So, for example, we get a breakdown of our ratio between mixed and conifer woodland, how much rough grassland we've got, and how much of all these other infrastructural codes as well. That report can be exported, you can download that to an Excel file and have that logged on your system, or you can have a look at a more granular view, which is what we call the table view. This is a row-by-row view of every individual feature that makes up your estate.

Once you've purchased that as well, you can start to use that data to create a plan. Just to quickly show you, in a very arbitrary case, let's say I'm applying for planning permission on this field. I've got the authoritative shape of that field that I can copy over to a separate plan by right-clicking and choose "Copy to Plan." I then choose "New Plan," and probably for this one, I'd use the sales template or maybe even the blank, which is a customizable template. That's just called "Sales Development," just to show you how to create a new plan. I've now brought over just that particular polygon, which is not the authoritative Ordnance Survey polygon, of which I can then style, label, draw shapes, etc.

Let's say, for argument's sake, I want to do a little building, I'm drawing my little building plan as well with the area on it in square meters, but you can see then I've now got the field boundary. I've got my shape, and I can start saying what I want that shape to become.

Okay, I'm just going to show you a couple of the functions. Like "Duplicate," and what that's done is that it's now replicated my building, I can start to draft up a bit of a site plan for my development site, etc., using that authoritative data to start with.