Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining another Friday webinar with me, Dan, at the Land App. Today we're going to be spending an hour talking about Countryside Stewardship and how you can prepare for it, plus a couple of updates both from the government and from the Land App.

As per usual, a bit of housekeeping before we start: your camera and microphone will remain off for the duration of the webinar. But that doesn't mean we don't want to hear from you. You can use the Q&A function that has been enabled at the bottom of your Zoom screen to ask any questions you may have, plus also see any questions that other people are asking. Do feel free to stay around after the webinar if you have any more questions, where we'll be able to hopefully answer those within time.

As usual, the webinar is being recorded and it will be added to our YouTube channel, probably on Monday, and we will be sharing it around with everyone that's registered. If you need to look back at anything we've shown, please do it there. And finally, we will be asking you just for a very short survey when you leave the Zoom. It should just open up a new window on your computer. I think there's five or six questions. If you could answer them, it would be much appreciated because they just help us better understand how you're trying to use the Land App and how we can improve.

The agenda for today is I'm just going to spend five minutes giving you a quick update, some slides both from Land App and from the government, and then just going to be talking about some key functions of the Land App, where we've made some updates including an introduction to a new tool that we released earlier this week called the Countryside Stewardship Validator. I'll then be doing a half an hour live demo, I'll be demoing best practice rebuilding a stewardship scheme, hopefully giving you some tips and tricks if you are planning a stewardship this year, and also be demonstrating that new tool. And then finally, there'll be 15 minutes at the end for us to go through any questions that are asked. Please do use that Q&A function if you want your question to be answered live at the end.

The recording will sit amongst other webinars that we've done. If you do have a moment, do check out our YouTube channel. Just search Land App in YouTube or follow the link that I think Kathy will put in the chat in a moment. And we've got lots of different webinars on there, everything from biodiversity net gain, how we're helping work with the Forestry Commission, SFI, and also more general Land App questions.

At the end of this month, for the 22nd of March, we have got another stewardship-based webinar. This one is less Land App specific and just more of a general conversation where we'll be looking at how stewardship has gone up to now and what the future is looking like. And we are going to be joined by some industry experts, one of which is already confirmed, which is Jake Fines from Hull Estate. And we've got a couple of others that we will be announcing early next week.

Updates from the government: The first announcement we had, I think in early February, is that the Stewardship application this year won't be opening as per usual in March or April. Instead, they're holding off opening the official application window to Summer 2024. We don't have an exact date for this yet, although we will be sharing it when we can. And the reason for doing this is they are moving stewardship to follow a rolling application window as per SFI. Plus, they are currently considering releasing a combined offer as well, which is an integrated stewardship, Countryside Stewardship, and SFI offer. The aim is to ultimately try and streamline the application process and reduce the administrative burden that happens in that mad rush from July until August when all the applications come in at once. They've also expanded the range of options and introduced a lot more stewardship options, including options that have been discussed, although not formally released, for AGR forestry, boundary management, water body restoration. All of the officially released payment rates and updated options that we know about are now live in the Land App. However, as more come through, we're hoping we'll be able to get them in when we can. But of course, anything you can do to support us in that, if you hear about new options that are being released or maybe we've got any options missing, please don't hesitate to get in touch with our support channel.

There is also the facilitation fund which has had enhancements, but I don't have any further information on that at the moment. If you're interested in facilitation funds, please do search for it on your web browser.

What have we done on Land App in response to this? The first thing is we've updated all the payment rates, and you can read about this within our February 2024 product update. We've got a new product lead called Jack who started back in November, but we're now on a monthly cadence releasing product updates onto the website. If you do want to know what we've been doing in any one month, if you go to the website and under the Community page, there is a tab that's called Product Updates relevant for stewardship. It's the new payments we've added, new codes, and those are on your screen at the moment. Plus, we have now released this new tool, which is the Countryside Stewardship Validator.

To explain what the validator is, I thought before I demo it, I just wanted to explain what it does and what it doesn't do. It's very much its first iteration. This isn't an end product; we're just testing it based on feedback that we've had over the last couple of years and actually real-world insight that we've had, including our CEO Tim who's just been going through a Stewardship application and there were hidden reasons why he hasn't managed to have as smooth of an application as possible. We built and released this to try and identify areas where a stewardship may not be accepted and provide you with action areas to improve that stewardship.

What the Stewardship Version One does, we in Version One but we'd love to work closer with you all to improve it is it does seven checks for you. And the seven checks are firstly it checks the field ID numbers that are associated to each option and ensures that you are using the correct option based on the correct field number. If you've drawn multiple points on Land App, it will make sure that all of those points are allocated to their parent field, and that just automatically does it for you. As a correction for Capital items, we just calculate the total value of capital that you've registered for, all the length of hedge row management and planting, the fences, etc., and just flags up a warning to you in orange when your Capital items exceed £50,000, that's roughly the threshold where you need RPA consent before you apply for stewardship. We also do a higher tier flag for any stewardship option maps in higher tier. We just give you a warning to let you know you've used a higher tier option. This isn't obviously an error if you are doing a high tier application, that's fine, but it's just a flag if you're going down the mid-tier route and you have a higher tier option within your application that you need to either remove or consider going for that higher tier. We also run a triple check through if any of your options intersect to trip SII, again we just flag it as a warning and we also send you the Natural England consent form that you would have to fill out as part of your application. We then have three errors, and these errors basically say that we are confident that this application will not be accepted and they come as a red feature on your map. The first is land use eligibility, we check the land use that's declared according to the Rural Payments Agency land cover data against your stewardship option and make sure that they are a match. For example, it will flag up if you put an arable option on a grassland field and I'll demonstrate that in a moment. We also detect where you've got overlapping polygons where they shouldn't be within stewardship. Your options can be overlapping, your supplementary options like supplementary grazing for example can sit on top of a grassland but where you've got potentially two revenue options that are on top of each other, we flag it as an error because you need to make sure that you're not double claiming. And then the final one we do is just check whether the land that you've drawn on your steward application is registered with the RPA or if it's outside of ownership, those errors will need to be addressed by an RD1 form or amending the plan to make sure it is within the ownership. Hopefully, that gives you a summary of what version one does, version two we are looking to introduce a couple of features, the one I'm excited about that I'm hoping will be moving forward on is shine features. We've been working closely with Historic England and a couple of other partners to try and make that accessible to flag up to you very quickly where historic consent might be needed. And how does this work?

Ultimately, we take your plan, and I'll demo this in the Land App in a moment, but we take your Countryside Stewardship plan and we run it through a validator. If that validator picks up any errors, those red boxes I just showed, it will serve you one plan, and that plan will just be a single issues plan color-coded based on this table, the orange ones being the warnings and the reds being the errors. If the validation detects that there are no errors, if there's no red areas on your plan, it will serve you an extra plan called validated plan that has reassigned your field IDs, and it will also serve you, if relevant, an issues plan that just has the orange areas for you to consider before you apply. The hope is that we clean the data for you and flag to you where the stewardship might need more consideration before you apply.

Just to reiterate, this isn't an exhaustive list; this isn't as replacing the need for you to do your due diligence either yourself or your client. We're just hoping this will flag errors early to make it more efficient rather than finding out six months down the line that you made a silly error. And everything I show you now obviously has been recorded, but we've got concise guidance on our help centre. If you just search for Countryside Stewardship Validator in our help articles, I'm sure Kathy will put the link as well in the chat for us.

What we're going to do now is do a bit of a live demo, firstly just starting at the basic: how do you build a stewardship plan from scratch on Land App, getting it to a point where I can then create a run the validator tool. For those that are new, Land App is found at thelandapp.com. Feel free to come and create a free account, where you can start creating maps, downloading field parcel data. As a note, the validator does sit within our first subscription tier which is called the standard subscription tier which is £10 per month. Lots of different pages on our website that you can come have a look at, particularly the case studies we've had, some really exciting case studies released. Come have a look and the product updates are found within that Community tab as well.

For those that haven't got an account can click sign up, fill out that short form and then they'll be ready to go. For those that do have an account, can log straight in like I've done, and you'll be met with your maps page. The first thing you do is create a new map by hitting the new button at the top right-hand side and giving in a name. I'm going to be using him our Founder's farm for the demo, NY farm and hit create an empty map. This drops you on an interactive base map that can be dragged around. You can manually find your location, you can search at the top of your location using postcodes or town names, for example, or you can change base maps as well.

We've got a number of different base maps that are available for you to use, including being imagery and being imagery with labels, and we've also got things like Ordnance Survey for those that have either credits to purchase or OS partners with their own OS data Hub account. Alongside that, we've got data layers as well. Data layers are found in our data layer library at the top right side, apologies depending on how your Zoom is set up, my head might be covering the button, feel free to drag me to the other side of the screen.

But within here, we've got a number of different data layers that will help you when you're building your stewardship plan, such as flood zones, such as priority habitat, etc. You can toggle those on readily, and we keep those up to date with the government system. As a note, the government has just been moving to a new Digital Services platform three and we are in the process. I think we've now completed moving everything over to that new system. To create an Countryside Stewardship, the first thing that we always recommend is downloading your land cover data and hedge R data from the Rural Payments Agency. And the way that you do this is you hit the new button at the top left, hit the try that out the way hit the import data button and choose import from rural payments.

When you're at this import from Rural Payments Agency, you then can type in a nine-digit SBI number and choose the data set that you want to download. You can download all three, but for a stewardship, I recommend not downloading the land parcels until you want to maybe make a nice print with the land parcel numbers on. I'm just going to download land covers and hedges for now. Next, you then choose which template you want that data to sit in and just take a quick moment explaining a bit about the templates.
The Land App releases plan templates to help you when you're creating a plan, and those templates follow existing schemes. There's a template for the Basic Payment Scheme for SFI, both the pilot and SFI 22, as well as SFI 23, which is the current one. Countryside Stewardship, which we'll be using in a moment, and there's a couple of others on there. The reason this is important is that these templates provide you with a drop-down list of options. You don't need to worry about misspelling a certain intervention or knowing what the code is for a particular stewardship option; we've got that pre-formatted for you.

When downloading your land cover and hedge row data from the Rural Payments Agency, we always recommend bringing it into the Basic Payment Scheme, even if you're not doing a Basic Payment Scheme. The reason this is valuable is that this provides you with the land cover data styled to those land covers themselves. We will be rebranding this at some point once Basic Payment Scheme is a thing of the past and probably just calling it land cover. It will still be there; it's still be very useful; it's just a more general land cover map than Basic Payment.

Once you choose the Basic Payment, you can then give it a name. I'm just going to call it "Norney," and it should then give it the rest of the name and hit finish. And what that does is that sends a request through the RPA, gets my up-to-date field boundaries and land covers, and drops them on a map. You can see I've now got land covers, which is this one showing my land cover declared at the moment - permanent grassland in this field, arable land in this field, and woodland over here.

When you're building a Stewardship plan, having sight of this land cover will help you understand which options should go where. Alongside that land cover, I've also been given the Hedge Row data as well - the location of where the RPA has registered its hedge data. Remember to ensure they're correct if you're putting in a stewardship option to do with the hedge rows. Just for the demo, I'm just going to colour in this arable one as a permanent crop, just yellow, and other than that, I'm going to ignore this land cover and just use it as a reference layer.

The next thing I want to do is I now want an empty plan that I can build my Countryside Stewardship template off, and the workflow is exactly as before by hitting new but this time I'm going to hit use template. And I'm then going to find a Countryside Stewardship template. Instead of re-importing it from the Rural Payments Agency, you can actually just click create an existing plan or import. They're both doing the same thing, and I choose which plan I want to create it from, which in this case is my land covers map.

What that has done is that has now just duplicated my land cover data onto a clean plan that allows me to apply Countryside Stewardship to rename that BSS. By having this land cover in the background, I can toggle it on and off just to remind myself what the existing land covers are when I'm doing my plan. The first thing I always do when I'm using Land App for Countryside Stewardship is I want to know a bit more about this farm. There's obviously lots of different data layers I can turn on. I can search for, for example, AOMs which this Farm is in, I can search for SSSI which this Farm is in, I can search for Green Belt which this is in as well, just CU I know them, and I can turn these on and off as I wish.

However, because there are 95 different data layers, what I would always do before running a stewardship is I would request a data layer report from Land App. The way these are accessed is by hitting the report button at the top going across from plans to data layers and hitting create report. The first thing it does is ask you to choose a reference area, and it doesn't matter these both got the same reference area. And then what I can do is I can ask Land App to go and do a search for me against all of these categories. I can basically say, "Land App, can you tell me which of these data layers my farm intersects?"

As a note, this report is only available on standard as per the tool, but for those that are on the subscription there, a really easy, neat way of you very quickly understanding what type of priorities designations targeting areas this particular Farm is in without me manually turning on and off data layers. The report takes about 15 seconds, and it's now complete, and this now will give me a full breakdown of all of the data layers that my farm does intersect. For example, public rights of way, I've got 853 meters of public rights of way, I'm in Guilford and Parish of Shackleford and Pepper Harrow, I'm in an AI'm in a Triple SSSI, etc., etc.
​
This breakdown of all those data layers allows you to then know what data layers to turn on, rather than doing a bit of a random turn them all on and find it out. You could do a report like one of the key things I'm thinking of when I'm building a stewardship. I'm thinking of flood zones, I'm thinking of priority habitat, and I'm thinking of SSSI, targeting. One of the other things that it does cover is also where there's no results, and these no results are basically where you don't intersect any of those layers which are just as valuable to know. You don't intersect any of these designations for this particular farm.

This report, by the way, can be downloaded. If you want to have it as an Excel file, you can hit the download button up there. And by the way, this will save now and every time I come back to the reports, I don't need to rerun it unless I want to. It's just there as a reference. Now I know I've got a priority habitat, I can search for priority habitat, which is covering the base of my field here, and I also know I've got a SSSI. I will turn that on, and I can see that the SSSI and the priority habitat are overlapping. Just got to be really considerate when doing stewardship options in there.

Now, time for me to draw my stewardship, and I'm very much going to do a bit of an arbitrary one, mainly to make the mistakes. We can test the validator, but also just show the process of drawing on your stewardship plan. The first thing I do is think about whole field options. Within stewardship, there's a number of options that I can apply to a whole field. For example, in this grass field at the top, I can click on the layer. Just be conscious when you're mapping on the left-hand side that the layer you're editing is the one you want to be editing, and that's demonstrated by the highlighting yellow. I'm not currently editing the land covers; I'm editing BCS now.

If I want to do a whole field option, I click on the panel on the right-hand side, you click the "assign use" button, and that assign use gives you a full list of all the categories that are under Countryside Stewardship. I can, for example, go into grassland and get a full list of all the grassland options that I may want to put into this stewardship. As an example, I'm going to just put in GS2. By applying that code to that polygon, a couple of things have happened. The first thing is that the colour of the polygon has changed. The styling is following the Rural Payments Agency guidance. All of the grassland will be given this orange and white stripe. The other thing that's happened is the data contained within that parcel has updated to reflect that stewardship.

The first thing is the code has been assigned. I could toggle on the code for the label, also got the name of the code, and I've also got the payment rates associated with that particular option, both in terms of the per hectare payment but also the total value based on the hectare times the payment rate. The other little hidden gem that I still don't think people properly use is that we also have a live dynamic hyperlink to the official guidance for that particular option. Because I've assigned GS2, I now have a link that I can click on here and that takes me directly into the official GOV website where I can read about this particular option, check about the eligibility, check about where I can use it, etc., etc. Apply that for a GS2, and just to re-show that, I can click on another parcel, I can hit "assign use," and I can type in a code that I may want to put in for now but might want to edit that in a moment. They're whole field options; they're the easiest ones to do.
As a note, you can hold shift on your keyboard and select multiple polygons at once. You don't have to assign one polygon at a time; I can hold shift and assign all of them at the same time. For example, when you're mapping, we have an undo button. If you've made a mistake like I've done, don't panic; you can hit undo just like you would on a web browser, and that will return it back to usual. It's going to turn off these data for a moment; I'll come back to those in a minute.

The second thing you can do is you can do part-field options. It might be part of your farm that you're wanting to put into a specific option. It might be taking small corners out of management, or there might be a buffer strip. I just want to highlight a couple of key ways of drawing those features depending on what they are. The first and arguably the most simple is that you can split an existing polygon into two or more shapes, and this might be, for example, taking a corner out. Hypothetically, I might want to take out this part of the field on the right-hand side and put it into a GS1 small area margin.

The way I do that is I right-click on the feature, providing it's highlighted, and choose that top scissor tool. That basically turns my cursor into a blue dot. I click once, and then the line will follow my cursor, and then I just need to click once outside of the polygon, double click, and what that's now done is that's now turned my polygon into two shapes. Those shapes haven't lost their field ID; they both still got the field ID. The main thing that's changed is that they've got different hectarages now. You can see that I've got two different blocks of different hectares.

This little feature I can apply to a particular code, which, for example, can be GS1 taking small areas out of management, and I can assign then the rest of that field into another option like, okay, you can take out corners or blocks by using the right-click and split tool. One top tip, maybe slightly more advanced users can diversify upon here: when you do split, if you hold shift on your keyboard and press and hold on your mouse, you can actually do bespoke clips as well. It doesn't have to be straight lines; you can be a bit more flexible and fluid with, say, a woodland edge, for example, or a pond that you're drawing by holding shift and holding down on the mouse key. This then area could be assigned to something else.

The other type of option is what I call a floating option, and a floating option is one that doesn't touch any edge of the field but is something you're putting in the middle. For example, a lapwing plot is a good example of a floating option. Hypothetically, if I wanted to put a lapwing plot in here, there's two stages to it. The first thing you want to do is draw the shape, and then the second stage is you want to subtract the area of that shape from the parent field which is in the background. I'll put on the hectare now and show you. What I want to do is put a lapwing plot in the middle here. I click on the field boundary; I then go to draw and I choose a shape that I want to draw. An area allows you to have quite a lot of flexibility to draw complex polygons. A rectangle allows you to have an exact square, and you can define the parameters, and a circle allows you to draw an exact circle, and you define the radius. For a lapwing plot, I'm going to use a rectangle and draw three points: one, two, three. Click once to finish and then hit the Finish button at the top, and now what I've got is I've got a square in the middle of my field.

You can do a couple of things with this square; you can change the exact width, for example, and height. I think, for example, a lapwing plot, the minimum size you can draw or AIS for is 0.25, although please check the guidance. I can make that an exact area, and you can also move it and rotate it. There's these tools at the Top; This is a move one; I can pick it up and move it to where I want, or I can rotate it to make it parallel to a particular cram line or third thing you can do is you can duplicate it as well. You got this little duplicate button. If I want two lapwing plots, I hit the duplicate and move, and what I then have is two identical squares that I can use, but I don't need two for now. Done and do okay.

That's the first thing I've drawn the shape I put it in the right location I then obviously assign it to the code. I just do lapwing nesting plots for lapwing. I put a code on it, but at the moment, I've got overlap. I've got overlap between my AB8 behind and my lapwing plot here and good best practice is you need to hold punch or subtract that lap plot from that wider option and you do that by hitting this buffer tool, hitting subtract, and hitting okay. When I hit okay, you'll notice that the 13 hectares will reduce by 25 hit okay, and you can see that that number is now gone down and the area is flush. Just to visualize that one small if I picked up and moved the lapwing plot, I've got a lapwing plot-shaped hole in my polygon. That's a floating option and that works the same for if you're doing a pond for example or you're doing maybe infield trees and you're trying to work out the total hectare etc.
The next, and obviously quite popular, one are buffer strips. Buffer strips can either be whole-field buffers, and they can be drawn using that buffer tool at the top by clicking on a field and choosing this buffer tool. Then you can either choose side one, which is the outside. Side one you might be using if you click on a pond and you want to add a buffer to the outside of a pond. Side two is for you if you're doing the interior edge of a field like I am here. I choose side two. You can then dictate the width of that buffer. I can say I want a 12-meter buffer or a 10-meter buffer, and that automatically calculates it for you. By default, and only recently we've added this, we automatically round the corners, and that just makes it a bit neater. You can turn the rounded corners off if you want, and it will make it a bit more jarring. Yeah, rounded corners are recommended. And then you can automatically subtract in here, and that just hole punches to speak that buffer around the outside. That then can be assigned its own code. Do I want... let's do, I don't know, which one, but in this one, I'm not sure if it's eligible, but the validator might have a word to say about that.

Just quickly then, you can also do partial buffers. That would the whole field if I wanted to put a buffer down the side of this field. The first thing I need to do is draw a line along the edge, and we automatically snap the line like you can see it follows the edge for me. Double click to finish, and then you add a buffer to the line you've drawn exactly the same as before, but this time just remember side two and side one aren't inside outside; they actually just mean left and right. Again, I can add a 12 or 24-meter buffer down the side of this field like 12 to 24 buffer, okay. You can see hopefully you can see I'm slowly building up a bit of a picture about what's happening because I got a triple SII down here, and I'm going to demo the validator in a moment. I'm just going to add a random option to this field like breeding waiters, which I think is a higher TI option as well, and I'm then going to also show you how you can draw capital items.

Capital items are additional options you get to for one-off C like putting in a fence or putting in a gate, and they are drawn in exactly the same way, but you just need to think about the shape of the feature before you start drawing it. And the rule I always have in my head is if you get paid per meter, you want to draw a line; if you get a payment per unit like a gate, you want to draw a point; and if you get paid per hectare or paid per meter squared, you want to draw an area. That's kind of the rule, but it might take a bit of thinking before you start going.

This say I wanted to put a fence along the outside of this woodland, just to show you the woodland is that dark green and then what I've got in striped brassin. And say I want to put a fence along the edge of this one, I would click on the shape, hit draw, and choose line. And then I would basically just trace, which automatically happens. You can see if I just trace the edge that I want to draw, you can see I can go all the way around to this thing without actually clicking and then double-click to commit that line and hit finish as per usual. You then assign the use, type in the code like sheet netting, and all of the payment rates etc. have been calculated for me on the fly. Might want to add some gates as well, exactly the same process, just select the polygon first, hit draw, and choose a point this time because gates are payment per unit and I want to put a gate there and a gate there as well, and I can assign those gates searching for the word gate.

Let's go for a wooden field gate and label it like. Hopefully, you can see that with all those different drawing tools, you've got quite a lot of flexibility to draw new shapes, adjust existing shapes, and start to build that stewardship plan. I'm going to take a moment now to just make some obvious mistakes because I want to demonstrate the validator tool because this is a good time to use it, and then I'll just finalize by showing you the reports that you can generate from a validated plan as well.

The first thing I've done is I've obviously got a triple SII down here; the validator should warn that to me. I'm also just going to put in a higher-tier option as well like wood pasture is a higher-tier option, for example. And I'm also going to purposely put a mistake in. This is currently a grass field, but I'm going to put in, say, an AB1 nectar flower mix. Okay, there's two obvious mistakes so far, and I'm also going to make one more mistake.

The other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to basically turn this into a supplementary option and show you that the supplementary options don't... I've basically created a duplicate, made a supplementary option, haymaking supplement, for example. So, quite a few different things happening, and when you're just looking at this map, it's quite hard to identify where you've made a mistake and where you haven't. What I'm going to do is I'm going to just quickly run a validator on this plan, and Land App will return to me two things: one, it will return to me any issues, but it's also going to send me an email with the report from that particular plan.

To access the tool, you need to be on standard subscription to start with. It's really aimed at those that are doing multiple stewardships or want to have a bit more functionality within the tool. You hit the three dots, and we've got this button that's called toolbox. When you hit toolbox, you then have this button that's called Countryside Stewardship Validator, and there's a bit of an information box as well about what it does. To run it, you simply click on the tool and hit run. And then it comes up with this little message saying thank you for requesting the validator, process is currently running, and you'll be emailed once it's ready. It does say a few minutes, but from experience, the validator takes not that long.

You can see I've refreshed my screen, and instantly I've had a report that's called issues. I've been sent this map still got my original CSS, but I've got one that's been prefixed by issues. If I turn it off, it's highlighted a couple of things for me. The first thing is it's highlighted that ineligibility. The red represents areas that you need to address before we produce a validated plan. This red box, for example, the area that's been thrown is land use is permanent grassland, but you've chosen an arable option or it's only eligible in arable land. That's the first error I have to address, and it's exactly the same I'd assumed with what I put around the outside. Yeah, I've put an arable option on a grass field. This whole field needs to be reconsidered, and to act on that, I need to then edit my original plan. I've currently got this whole field, which is completely wrong. I need to act on it, and I can do that by either merging these two back together and turning them into a grassland option. Okay, next time I run it in a moment, which I'll do, that should now come through as eligible because I've acted on this issue warning. What else has come through is this orange block, and again, what happens is on the right side, you get this warning. This is just an orange warning just to let you know that you've put a higher-tier option in. This orange feature is saying, you know, we're not blocking you from doing it, but just be aware that you put in a higher-tier option.

And then down in the Wetland, a couple of things have happened. The first thing is this is an orange box because it's got two warnings. It's got a higher-tier warning, be cautious, you've got a higher-tier option or feature present, plus we've also got this message as land contains an SSI, your agreement cannot start until your client has received Natural England consent. That's basically warning to you; it's not a blocker; you may have already got consent, but just reminding you of that. As for these points, oh yeah, that's the do with land use. Interestingly, we've got a red point. Let's see what he is; this feature is outside the RPA ownership boundary. Interesting, have a quick look; it might be on the precipice then if I just move it slightly for the error like that should then fix that.
​
Okay. I should have addressed all the red issues now before I run this. I just wanted to show you one more thing. I'm just going to pause my screen and come on to my email. In my email inbox, I've been sent this. I've received from Land App saying, "Hi Dan, thank you for running the stud validator. Here's a summary of your errors." A breakdown is that I had two land use errors. I've got no overlapping errors because my overlap was a supplementary option. I've got two high features present. I've also got a triple SII intersection, and I don't need that at the moment. It's not my natural Capital options, sorry, are not overall contained. This note, because it's in a triple SII, because your land contains a triple SII, you need to go to this hyperlink to ensure that you have completed the right Natural England consent. Okay, attached to that email is the report. If you want a breakdown of all the issues and areas and what field numbers they are they're within there. And the final thing to say about this email is we have this button which is called "take the survey." This is where we're going to get all the feedback from you about one where things aren't working as you expect, which we'd love to keep up to date, but secondly where you would like to see more things happen. We've already had about 10 people test it for us and shine was an obvious one. We're trying to work on that but if there's other things you think this validator could help with, we're really keen to crowdsource this amongst all of our subscribers, and please do fill in the feedback and just make sure when you choose the tool you're choosing "Countryside Stewardship Validator". Okay, back to my map.

I've hopefully addressed the issues on my original plan. Just be aware, I've edited the original plan not the issues map and I've hopefully addressed all those things. I've moved the field gate, I'm happy with the orange warning, and I've updated the values. Now when I go to rerun the same CS validator and go to "toolbox" and "Countryside Stewardship Validator" I hit run what this should return for me is two plans hopefully providing I've done everything well. It will return the issues report again, the warnings that we've got but it should also return a secondary plan which is called validated. The issues just to show you are just containing those orange flags from before where they're high here. You can see I've got no red polygons or no red points on my map anymore. The validated plan is now a clean version of your original plan that we recommend you then use moving forward and the reason for using this is behind the scenes we may have adjusted the field IDs for each of those features etc. This is now a clean validated plan that you then have to create a table view report. I can get a clean table view of all of those options I've drawn with my each feature with its own ID etc. that's downloadable. I can download this to excel or I can get a summary of this validated report as well by going into the report section up here and hitting "add plan" and looking at my validated breakdown I get a nice clean validated summary of the stewardship plan that I've just drawn knowing hopefully with a bit of confidence although as I mentioned this isn't exhaustive but it's at least gone through those basic checks to make sure that I'm aligning my work and keeping up BR reputation etc. In terms of the St application worth saying that we don't currently have a direct Link in with the RPA or DEFRA although it is something that we are really wanting to push like we'd love for you to be able to submit either an expression of Interest or the actual plan here to the RPA it is something we're working on but what you we have got official sign off and I saw Janet Hughes a couple of months ago and she confirmed that you can submit this plan to the RPA as your m evidence are you do not need to fill out an option map with crayons you can submit this map directly to the RPA as part of your email submission to do that however please do check the guidance at the bottom right hand side if you search for "CSS map should work" yeah here go Countryside stewardship scheme mapping guidance for for and option Maps if you are wanting to give your map from land app just make sure you read this guidance and follow all the the key points.
It needs to be printed. It needs to be the right scale. You need to have all the correct labels on your map; you have the field ID, for example, showing, and you need to make sure it's styled using our default styling. Yeah, we've got a bit of an information pack there. We've done a bit of a webinar on it if you do want to use this part of the application rather than the option map. You are welcome to do, which is great news. And the printing function is found on the top right-hand side. But in the name of time, we can have plenty of time for Q&A. I'm not going to show that, but please do, yeah, have a little look at our help and guidance if you're interested in how you make your prints look pretty and ready for application.