Webinar - Site scoping with Land App: Find the right land, faster!

Hi there, everyone.

We'll get started now. Welcome, and a very good afternoon to you. Thank you for joining. My name is Will Sibi, and I'll be hosting this session entitled "Site Scoping with Land App: Finding the Right Land Faster."

For those who don't know me, I'm one of the account executives. My colleague Rosie is here to provide technical support and answer some of your questions throughout the session. If you're in the audience today and you struggle to understand new sites and different areas of land for your projects or opportunities, this webinar will demonstrate some very simple tools that make it much easier for you to understand those different projects and areas of land. You'll quickly learn how to use Land App to assess different land parcels, ultimately saving you time, reducing any risks, and helping you support your decisions at speed.

We're continuously developing Land App, and your feedback is very valuable to us. These webinars not only act as a way for us to showcase different aspects of the app but also as an opportunity for you to share your feedback and questions, and to help us improve the tool. Please do be engaged. We have a Q&A function at the bottom of your screen for you to submit your questions.

Moving on to these product updates, the first were launched yesterday.

Secondly, let's look at new data layers. Our data engineering team has managed to introduce quite a few in the last month or two. Starting with the environmental agreements we have:

I appreciate there are quite a lot of data layers there, but please do have a look if any of those are interesting to you.

Moving on to the demo itself, the theme of this session is site finding, which is a broad theme. I've checked, and we have a wide range of people from different organizations and sectors in the audience today. I think the key points we want to get across are how Land App is valuable for this and the different site analysis it provides, making complex interpretations of different sites much easier and quicker than you usually would. In tandem with that, you can easily visualize all that complex data in Land App with a range of our core mapping functions, as well as the printing abilities you can see on the right there. We'll illustrate these different use cases here, but I'll be focusing mainly on a solar project in the demo. This is just a showcase of what these different functions can do. Even if you aren't working in the solar or renewable energy sector, you can use this demo to try and relate what you can do with them in your own sectors and jobs. We'll be really honing in on both Land Registry data and data layers in the demo.

I'm getting Land App ready, so please do think about your questions as we go along. You should see Land App on your screen now, and I've prepared this map for us to begin the demo. If you're brand new to Land App, I can quickly go through some navigation.

Starting from the top, we have different base maps available from this menu. The default is Open Street Map, which we can see now, but we can also use Ordinance Survey maps, Ordinance Survey Light (a grayscale version), and different satellite imagery base maps. Then we have this aerial imagery, which is a much crisper, cleaner version of that photographic view of the land.

While we're here, we can actually look at the historic base map that I showed a moment ago. We're in Kent, and this is what the map was like in 1900. I imagine this base map is really good not only for seeing what was present at the time to restore different habitats or buildings but also it's just a really interesting one to look at. Overlaying the Land Registry data, you can actually see where there's been quite a bit of urban sprawl from different areas, which is interesting. Please do have a play around with that. As mentioned, the historic base map is available for Standard and Professional users, so you won't see it in the Free version, and the same applies to this Land Registry data layer.

For the demo, I'll use the Ordinance Survey Light base map, which is quite a nice crisp and clean base map to use. Speaking of Land Registry, it makes sense to cover that first as it's quite important for this context. I've prepared two sites here: Site 2 and Site 1 for our solar site. All I did to get these was click New and Import Data, then click Pick from the Land Registry. I can just zoom in and see all the different land registry titles mapped out on our map. I can click on any of those, click next, and choose a blank template, and that's downloaded instantly for me. Not only is that a really quick way of downloading any land title, but it's also a direct link with the Land Registry's mapping portal, so you can be confident that this is authoritative. This is what it looks like there, according to the Land Registry.

This is our map, and all the parcels that sit under it. I can also view the area and perimeter, but we also have the title number and Inspire ID carried over, which helps to streamline the right data you need. It's authoritative, which is a big asset. I'll just delete that because we don't need it for this demo. Secondly, you can get Land Registry data another way. We have Land Registry Freehold and Land Registry Other, which are different titles that are either not owned or are under a different ownership. We've also got Leasehold as well, highlighted in green. Again, I can click on any of these, and we have that data around the title number, the size, etc. But I also have these options here. If I click Ownership, I can see if it's a corporately owned land title. If a company owns it, I can see the details of that owner, like here, GSE Trustees Limited. Sorry if anyone from GSE Trustees is here. We can copy all of that information onto our clipboard. This is only available in the Standard and Professional licenses, so you won't see it in the Free one.

A third, quite significant thing I want to mention is that we've just brought in something that's a work in progress. You can buy private details and title deeds from the Land Registry for privately owned land titles as well by clicking on that button there. At the moment, it's not live. If I click on it, it will take me to a survey. We're being a bit cheeky and are collecting survey answers to give us an idea of whether this information is useful, why you're using it, and what tier it should be in. We're really interested in hearing from anyone who sees this in a Professional subscription. If this is important to you, please do click on that Buy Titles button and complete the survey because that would really help us in how we develop that feature. So, I've covered all the bases around the Land Registry.

I'll just turn off that data layer and we'll focus now on our two sites. You can imagine you've identified these areas. They might be for sale or they might have been talked about within your portfolio or estate, and you've imported them into Land Registry. A really simple, quick thing you can do next is to overlay different data layers over these areas to tell you more about them. In this context, if you're looking for solar farms, you'd probably already have looked at the different distribution network operators and the overhead lines that sit over it. We have that data layer in Land App. I have all these different lines which represent overhead lines now, in different colors, representing different voltages. We can see here that Site 2 is ideal. We've got a few overhead lines above us. This orange one running through is a 33-kilowatt line. Likewise, this one over here has plenty of lines we can connect to, ideal for a solar site. We'd also want to look at a lot of other data layers in this process.

Before I go through all of these different data layers, we can run something called a Data Layer Report in Land App, which I can access up here from the reports page. You'll get this tab first, which is your Plan Reports. These are just a breakdown of the different features that would sit within one of your plans. We want to click this tab here and look at Data Layers. What these are is, I'll pick data layers, and choose Site 2 for this one. It will tell me whether these data layers intersect with my boundary. In a context where we're looking at this site, we want to know if it's ideal for solar or any other type of planning, and what the potential opportunities and constraints are around or within it. I can choose all of those here. For interest, let's go to Local Planning Authority. We have things like Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs), which should be National Landscapes now, potentially Green Belts, Local Nature Reserves, National Parks, Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs), the SSSI Impact Risk Zone, maybe Scheduled Monuments. We might want to be thinking about the different Agricultural Land Classification (ALC), so whether it's Grade 1 to 6 land, potentially different habitats, maybe Ancient Woodland, we touched on the invertebrate layer in the updates, and let's just pick Flood Zones as well. Then, give it a name like "Solar Site Two Report" and click done.

While that's running, I've prepared a couple of others to show you. You can do this for any size area you want, there's no limit to that in Land App. I've actually chosen Bath and Northeast Somerset County, which is where I am now. You can do really big areas if you're looking at, for example, how much building potential there is in a certain area or how much green cover or nature sits within it. You can check that here. For Bath and Northeast Somerset, we've got about 9,920 hectares of SSSIs. A large area sits within an SSSI Impact Risk Zone at 100%. We can look at different trees within the county, registered battlefields, etc. There's a lot of Grade 3 and Grade 4 land, so not the prime agricultural land we might get in the east. You can look at how much of the land is under Countryside Stewardship, which is quite interesting. A quarter of Bath and Northeast Somerset is currently undergoing environment schemes. You can see the most prominent options in Countryside Stewardship that sit within that county. So, a lot of grassland, different sheep netting infrastructure, and so on.

You can really quickly understand a huge amount about different areas of land with this function. Going back to the two solar sites, if I was weighing them up to see which one is more ideal than the other, I can compare the two. I've made one for Solar Site 1. I just want to quickly glimpse at different designations. It's in a high flood zone, nearly 80%, so they're both mostly Flood Zone 3, which could be an issue. It's also in a Nitrate Vulnerable Zone (NVZ), and 100% sits within a SSSI Impact Risk Zone. That's not great, but there's still some scope compared to Solar Site 2. For Site 2, we have 0% in a flood zone, which is a bonus. It's mostly Grade 3, which is also great, and it sits within a SSSI Impact Risk Zone. So, there are things I need to be aware of from this data layer report that I need to jot down and probably think about, like Natural England and the Environment Agency. But all the others that I've considered opportunities or constraints, they're not present, so I don't need to worry about them now. There's no need to overlay all of them one by one just to check whether they sit in it. From that, we can deduce that Site 1 is heavily in a flood zone, but Site 2 is looking more ideal. So, we'll run the demo looking at Site 2. I'll turn off Site 1.

Okay, great. The next step is to probably hone in on some of those key data layers that we talked about. We know which ones we don't need to look at and which ones we do. In this context, we probably want to consider the routes to power, as that's the main thing. We want to build solar, so we need to look at how we connect that to the grid operation networks. We're happy with that. For this area site, it's 40 hectares, we're looking at a decent kilovoltage from that, and we've got this orange line here, which is with UK Power Networks, and it's 33 kilowatts. So, that's a quite easy evaluation I can make—it's probably a good opportunity here. I can add some kind of transformer or inverter to my map that can connect to that overhead line. We'll just draw that like so. We can give that a label, say "Inverter/Transformer." I'll turn that off.

In cases where you might need to evaluate a route that's quite far and is outside of your boundary, you can imagine this site wasn't anywhere near any overhead lines. We might need to create some kind of connecting infrastructure outside of the boundary. That's where that Land Registry Buy Titles data layer would come into hand because if we're thinking about any kind of infrastructure outside of our boundary, we'll want to understand who owns this land. We'll need to get in touch with them and get permission from them too. So that's one potential use case for that private title deed purchase. But we're happy with this; we've got our DNOs close by and we're happy with the transformer that's sitting there.

Next, we probably want to look at the details of the features within the boundary. I notice we did have a slight public right of way here. We can just overlay that, and yes, we have a public right of way going across this land that we've highlighted. So, we probably don't want to be building over that. I can also see that there's potentially some woodland or some kind of natural features down here from our Ordinance Survey data. So we want to be mindful of that. It's quite a large area, so what we can do is just section off a nice working area in our map using this Split function. We don't want to work on that, so let's give that a nice gray like so. This is our new working area. We might want to add a buffer to the inside of Site 2, maybe working around that area, just to clear any bases if we're near this public right of way. We can ease out of that a bit by creating this buffer here.

So that's ticked off. We've checked our public rights of way. We might want to look at access now. Again, from this Land Registry data, I've got this track or what looks like a track running through. Yeah, there we go. We want to think about that too and start plotting it within our map. Again, using this drawing function, we have a whole range. I chose "Area" for the transformer, but for this track, we probably want to choose "Line." Then, with this quite hidden thing, I have to admit it's not the most discoverable in Land App, is this Interactive Map button here. We want to turn that on. What that will do is, against this Ordinance Survey data, it will snap to the line and just follow the different details we have on our map. If I go across, it's moving nicely against my line. You can see it's snapping to each of these details on the map. We can just move up to create this track. Click finish. That would be our track and access. It's just a line at the moment, so what we could do is just use that buffer again to widen it a bit. The default is 8 meters, which we can set there. So, we've got that covered. We can give it a name as well.

The key bases there, public rights of way and access to our site, are ticked off. We can see again from this Ordinance Survey background that we have potentially quite a bit of vegetation on the map. We can also use that aerial imagery base map to view it. But we have a parcel breakdown. We've got these quite thick lines of trees breaking up the different fields, which we don't want to get rid of. There are a couple of different things we could do here. Again, we could draw lines over this just to divide it up, or we could go back to the Ordinance Survey base map, go to our Data Downloads, and there's a data download tool here called Vegetation Data that we can choose to download and then place different vegetation above 2.5 meters on our map. This is downloading from a few different datasets, including the Environment Agency's vegetation object model, and it's actually from Meta (as in Facebook Meta) and WRI, which is a global dataset. We chose Meta because we did tests, and the accuracy was very, very good, so that's the reason why it's in there. In a few seconds, that should have downloaded for us. We've got that new plan on our map showing the different vegetation. If I click on any of these, it's judging this as woodland, and that's nicely laid out on our map. It should be pretty accurate where it's showing that, which looks pretty good to me. Now we've got that instantly on our map, really quickly and simply. From there, we've got a nice outline in which we want to plot our solar.

So that's ticked off. We've got our public access, our vehicle access, our transformer, and our vegetation. The last thing we probably want to be thinking about, and you can relate all of this to any projects you're working on, is the aspect, particularly for solar. It's a nice south-facing title. We could use this Ordinance Survey terrain base map or data layer to gauge that it's looking relatively flat, perhaps not over here in that area that we've sectioned off, so it was a good idea we did that. It's looking like a good, optimum, flat terrain for our solar. Again, on top of that, we could go back to our Data Downloads and use this tool here called the Slope Identifier to give us an even more advanced look at the different terrain we might be getting on this map. Again, another couple of simple steps: choose our plan, which is Solar Site 2, give it a name, say "Slope 2," and click download.

While that's running, I'll actually point out another slope identifier map that we've created. This has been out for a good year. Usually, we'd have different areas representing steep inclines in quite orange and red shades, but we've very recently updated this download to have a different shade. We've got green and blue, but we've also got these arrows as well, which were certainly requested. We can just see what the direction of these slopes are. This dark area here is a very high incline, more than 11 degrees, going down to this lighter shade of blue, which is 7 to 11 degrees, to this green, 3 to 7 degrees, and this light green, 2 to 3 degrees. This is great not only for telling us where water might flow but also for showing us where areas are flat or not flat. The arrows are indicating where the incline is going upwards. We see they're all heading towards this steeper area at the top. So this white area on our map is nice and flat. I'll just give that a refresh to see if our other one is done, which it is. I'll just turn off that one and see what it's come up with here. That orange-red shade that I mentioned is shown here, and we were right. From that OS terrain base map, we can see this area over here is much more of an incline than this area over here where we're thinking of doing some solar installation. It's interesting that we've got these quite neat lines of different lumps and bumps. But again, it's really simple and quick, telling you quite a bit about this area. The Slope Identifier is in the Standard and Professional subscription, so you won't see this in Free. If this is going to be useful to you for different applications, do think about upgrading.

Okay, so we've got quite a lot of data now set up. We've got our vegetation, our slope, and our track. The next step is we can go further and actually start plotting our solar once we're happy with that. To do that, I'm quite simply just going to follow these lines and plot them like here. I've got a nice guide by that vegetation data. We can cordon that off. We're going to think about our DNO overhead lines. We're going to think about our track access. We'll just plop that up quite simply. And then one last one here. Click finish. We can give it a style if we want to as well. We can go for quite a low opacity, and solar is usually horizontal, so let's choose this pattern. That looks good. There we are. We're quite happy with this plan that we've very quickly drafted up. My background is not in solar and infrastructure, it was in agriculture, so I've done my best, but hopefully all of this just shows you how a lot of data about this land is quickly and easily retrievable through Land App to help speed up your project planning.

Lastly, one last point before we move on to the Q&A, and I'm conscious we're on time, is that we might want to print this for whatever reason. It could be for planning or for sharing with different bodies we might be working with. To do that, it's really quite simple. We go up to our Print button, creating this frame. We can choose our paper size, let's go for a big one, A2 landscape. We can choose the scale by using the fixed scale option. I know there are requirements, let's go for 1:500. Give it a border. I quite like "Narrow" because it maximizes the space around our map. Then we can choose our background. Let's run with Ordinance Survey Light. If we want to use Ordinance Survey data, you'll see a cost there. This is a licensed product and data we're using. There's an annual license fee associated with that, and that will vary depending on where you're printing. Urban areas are usually more expensive than, for example, moorland or rural areas. It will give you dynamic pricing for the cost of that, and there are discounts for Standard and Professional users of 20% on all these prints. We're happy with that. Purchasing this would mean you'd have unlimited use of this frame. We can give it a header, let's go with "My Solar Farm." We'll pop that at the top. Give it a footer, "Will, September 25," maybe the date. You can give it a legend and put that here. You can actually edit that legend. So, this is where we want to add our solar panels and woodland. I'm happy with that. We can save those changes. We can make that much larger.

As I'm doing this, it's good to point out that if you're in a Standard or Professional organization, you can actually save this template that I've created. So whether you want to add your logo or choose that legend format and where the different headers and footers are, I can save that template for my organization, and all the users that sit within it. Again, that's going to help with saving time and keeping things consistent. Once saved, any user can then go back into one of their prints or create a new print, and this same format will be saved for them. We're happy with all of that, and then we can preview it or we can just click Buy Now. Give it a code. You can either click "Billable" or "Non-billable." "Billable" would mean that the cost of this will be invoiced to me when my regular subscription invoice comes. If you're on a monthly subscription, that's the first of every month. For an annual subscription, it will be on your renewal date. Or I could click "Non-billable," and that will be invoiced to me straight away. We'll just prepare that in a moment.

So, that kind of wraps up our solar panel plan quite nicely. There's more I could do. I could add labels. I could even overlay different data layers onto my map and still print those on the map to a much larger area, which you might need to do. I'll take a moment to do that.