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Webinar - Maximising Biodiversity Net Gain with Land App
Webinar - Maximising Biodiversity Net Gain with Land App

Covering several tools that can help you save costs, and reduce the time to application.

Simla Rees-Moorlah avatar
Written by Simla Rees-Moorlah
Updated over a week ago

Summary

The webinar is hosted by Dan from Land App, focusing on maximizing biodiversity net gain.

  • The agenda includes updates on government announcements, demonstrations of land app functions for biodiversity net gain, and a Q&A session.

  • Key tools discussed are the UK habitat baseline, a new biodiversity net gain tool, and a live demo of both functions.

  • Land App assists in generating site boundaries, conducting data queries, assessing habitat eligibility, and calculating unit uplifts for biodiversity net gain.

Transcript


Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you so much for joining this Friday afternoon webinar with me, Dan from Land App. I'm head of growth here and delighted to be able to take you through how we are building tools to help everyone going through the biodiversity net gain process. A bit of housekeeping at the start: as this is the webinar, your camera will remain off and your microphone muted, but that doesn't mean we don't want to hear from you. We'd love for you to interact with us through the Q&A function that is enabled on the bottom of your screen. So any questions you've got throughout the webinar, please ask them, and we've got a bit of time at the end of the session to go through them. What we tend to do is we might stay around for 10 minutes after the Q&A is finished just if you got any questions and you want to unmute yourself. The session is being recorded and will be shared on our YouTube channel within the next 3 to 5 days. So we'll try and get it out as usual on Monday. We'd like to use these times to also ask our customers or potential customers a bit more information about themselves and how it can inform our product roadmap. So as you leave the webinar, whether that's at the end or you might need to shoot early, please do take five minutes just to answer those questions. I think there's six or seven that we've loaded up. It just really helps us and informs us on our next steps. So the agenda for today is that I've got five or so minutes just to obviously welcome you all and give you some updates.

In particular, there was an announcement yesterday from the government, so I'll give you a bit of an update on that, although still need to do a bit of reading myself. We're then going to just talk through the main Land App functions that are hopefully going to help you maximize biodiversity net gain. So we're going to talk about our UK habitat best guest Baseline and a new tool that we're releasing for biodiversity Net gain. Then I'll be giving a live demo of both of those two functions followed by a Q&A session. We will be trying to end promptly at 2 o'clock, so as per usual, just wanted to let you know that we've got a YouTube channel. So if you go on to YouTube and search Land App, you should be able to find a whole wealth of previous webinars, demonstration videos, etc., that are relevant. So if you want to catch up with anything else we're doing, whether that's the Forestry Commission partnership, whether that's just an introductory session, or what you get from joining our different subscription tiers, lots of different videos on there. For this demonstration, there will be a bit of an introduction, but it might be a bit detailed. So if I feel like I've missed any of the key parts, YouTube's a really good place to get caught up with that. Oh, he says as he clicks on it. So just updates from the government announcement yesterday. I would like to say it was planned, but didn't know they're announcing it yesterday, so good timing really. So we heard yesterday that the official date for biodiversity Net gain to go live is the 12th of February. So that's for major developments, and a major development is anything that's greater than 10 or more dwellings or where the site is greater than 0.5 hectares, and that will be mandating a 10% net gain uplift for those developments. For small sites, the date is a bit more extended, and that's the 2nd of April 2024. And those small sites are any sites that are nine or less dwellings and any commercial developments where that floor space is less than a thousand square meters. Also in 2025, we are expecting another announcement around the nationally significant infrastructure projects, but we haven't been given a firm date on that. And obviously with these announcements comes quite a lot of questions but hopefully a lot of opportunities as well for the developers to really contribute to Nature recovery in a very innovative and world-leading initiative. But for those landowners and advisers, opportunities to start getting funding to start creating and enhancing existing or new habitats. So we are very excited at Land App about the biodiversity net gain scheme. We know it's got complexities but hopefully where here to help allow you unpick the different steps and get ready for trading and hopefully benefiting from it.

So we've kind of categorized how Land App can help in two main categories. The first is the planning stage, so that's a predominant amount of my demo today. It's how you can use the Land App to start your plan. That is, both building the Baseline. So if you're a land manager or a landowner understanding your existing assets and starting to build a future plan to understand what amount of biodiversity units you could be looking to trade or how much uplift you could generate. And from a development site building your Baseline, i.e., where the existing site of potential development is going to happen and starting to see the impact of that development. So you start to get an understanding of how many units you might be needing to purchase, whether you can do that onsite or whether you might need to do off-site unit purchasing. So what I'm talking about today is for both sides of the equation, we're agnostic and we're just trying to build a tool to allow you to build those plans to understand the next steps. As part of that planning, it's very important to collaborate, whether you're collaborating with your clients if you're representing a particular individual. The Land App makes it very easy to start to share those plans in a safe, secure but dynamic space so you can see those plans being developed and see those scenarios being built. We then, of course, want you to be able to formalize that into the official C calculator. And so there are ways of you pre-populating and updating your biodiversity metric using the download function within Land App. On the other side then is a digital register. So as part of your biodiversity net gain application, you do need to officially register it through the .gov website. And what Land App can help with that is generating your site boundary so you can now upload geospatial data to the digital register. You need a grid reference, which you can extract from Land App, and you need a map as well. So you can do all of those things as part of your process, and I'll be demonstrating at least what the Land App does in those instances today, plus you obviously need a map as well, evidencing your management plan. So while you're building your unit calculation, you're building a plan, you're building a map, and all of that can be exported ready for upload onto the .gov website. So the new tool that is going live next week on the 24th of January.


I'm very excited about what we've built because of the feedback we've had from our existing biodiversity tool. As of the 24th of January, all of our professional users, the users in the professional subscription, will be able to access this new net gain estimator tool. What it does, and I'll be demonstrating it in a moment, is it geospatially shows you where the units are being generated. So, you run the tool through your baseline, through your future scenarios, and it outputs your uplift. Obviously, if you're a development site, your uplift will be a negative number if you're putting buildings on an existing site. But you still then start to calculate what requirements are needed for each part of your plan. We serve within that retention, creation, enhancement, and the post-site intervention total, as well as the baseline units, which allow us to calculate the uplift as part of this process. And I'll explain it a bit more. We do use some proxies for strategic significance. This demo is on a strategic significant of one, but there are certain areas of the country which I demonstrate will get that multiplier of 1.15 or a 15% uplift. This announcement doesn't mean we're discontinuing the existing tool, so any users who are already using the biodiversity reports tool, that is going to stay in production. And I've got a bit of a slide at the end to show you what that is, but very much today's demo is going to be about this new tool that we're launching. Before I get into that tool, I just wanted to explain a bit more about our UK habitat best guest baseline. This is a data workflow that we've built in partnership with UKAB. UKAB Limited are the ones that created the classification itself and have worked with Natural England to build the metric. The best guest baseline is a data creation that we do on your behalf based on any boundary within Great Britain. We're predominantly looking at England today, but the dataset does work in Wales and Scotland. In principle, what it does is it takes your licensed Mastermap data. So, you do need to have an Ordnance Survey license for those that are public sector bodies and are part of the public sector geospatial agreement. We can use that license to help you get access to this data as well, but if you are a private entity, you do need a license when purchasing this dataset. What we then do on your behalf is the landout runs data queries for each one of those features within your Mastermap. So, you have a Mastermap shape on the land app, and we check against open layers such as priority habitat inventory, the forest inventory, etc. We check against Earth observation, looking at daily views, temporal changes in grassland, looking at some other attributes that allow us to start to prioritize different habitats. And we also look at a vegetation model which runs through a series of queries to output what we call a best guess baseline. And the best guess baseline is just a single clean geospatial layer with our best guess of what habitats fall within that boundary. Each feature then, so each of those polygons, will be assigned a code, and that code is ready for input into the biodiversity tool. But as we, you know, we're selling it as a best guess, we're getting better and lots of feedback is coming in, but it isn't going to be perfect. It isn't to replace an ecologist; it's to drastically speed up that time it takes for an assessment to be done. Instead of the ecologist having to draw all the shapes on a map, we have provided all the shapes for you, and you are then just improving it by either amending the habitat codes or adding condition scores. As well as a note, to use the BNG tool, you need to be in the professional subscription. What we've also released is a 30% discount for any professional subscribers when purchasing the best guest baseline. To get a quote for the best guest baseline, please reach out.


It's very simple; you can do it in the app. I'll be demoing it in a moment, and we've also got some other guidance as well, more around the best guest Baseline. As a note, we've made some improvements in January to it, so any previous users, thank you so much for feedback. And I think I've got some thank yous in a moment, but as of January now, we've made quite a few improvements to Morland and Upland habitats. It was definitely a weakness through some of our rigorous testing, and so we've drastically improved the accuracy of detecting the different Upland habitats. Our grassland detection is getting much better, particularly with the Earth observation like the temporal view, the difference between temporary grassland and permanent grassland, but also picking up modified grassland as well in that area looking at the Earth observation, so that more Ry grass-rich habitats. And we've also, with the help of some of the forest commission data sets, now been able to further attribute the Woodland types as well. Whereas previously sometimes the output was Woodland W woodland or W1 broadleaf Woodland, we've managed to get a bit further down the classification using a number of different data sets. And as I mentioned, you know, it is a best guess; it is getting better. We're not here to sell you a perfect Baseline. And just to reiterate, this isn't, you know, we still need ecologists ground-truthing the data to make sure it's accurate, but we are confident it is drastically speeding up time if you are using the dataset. And if there is any feedback, whether there's any errors or omissions, please let us know. You can contact me directly at TH land.com or submit a support request through the app itself. And yeah, I just wanted to say we're very grateful for all the partners that have currently fed back into the software and the best guest Baseline. We've had theologists out double-checking, feeding back where there's errors, and it's just making the models more and more detailed, so thank you so much. And we have got some case studies on those as well. So if you're interested in how other people are using the best guest Baseline in relation to biodiversity net gain, the AL wise case studies are a really good one around the old Wiis estate. We did some detailed ecological mapping and comparing outputs of ecologists reports with the best guess Baseline with the Wendling Beck case study and our official announcement ukab limited as well. And you can get all these on our website if you head over to the case study page, which is under the community. So the rules for biodiversity units in Land App. Before I move on to the demo, I just wanted to make sure you're clear on how we are handling biodiversity units and also some best practice. The first one is that we encourage for every site for you to have an authoritative layer that represents that site boundary and make sure, particularly if you're using or working with multiple clients, make sure your naming convention for those layers is consistent. For example, boundary under site name under surname is a good way of handling the plans naming your maps consistently again very important.

I would go for something like template type or surname. What that means is, especially when you're using the data reports, you're very clear on whose maps you're using. If you're aggregating lots of sites across a BNG or other type of assessment for B& specifically, what you need on your plan is one authoritative habitat map. So, per site, you want to make sure you have one layer that represents the best source of truth for the ground, and that habitat map needs to be allocated level three plus codes in the UKAB hierarchy. What I mean by that is, if you've just got a habitat that's labelled GG grassland, it will not generate any units. You need to make sure it's down far enough in the classification for there to be a unit assigned to it. For example, G2a LAN calcareous grassland is a habitat that is eligible for biodiversity units; grassland isn't. The same goes for Woodland. If you've just got W woodland allocated, it's not enough. It needs to be W1g other broadleaf Woodland, for example. A bit of a rule of thumb that I tend to follow is if your code has got less than three digits, it's probably not eligible for B&. There's one exception, which is G4 modified grassland is eligible, but everything else, you want to make sure that your code of your habitat type has got at least three characters, if not more. And then finally, you can use the publish function, which I'll show in a moment, to calculate the unit uplift. Just to reiterate, everything I'm showing now requires you to be on a professional subscription for the B& element, but the UKAB best guest Baseline is available to everyone. You do not need to be on a paid subscription to purchase the best guest Baseline; you can do that within the free or the standard accounts. And then the other assumptions we make when calculating biodiversity units with this new toolbox is, first and foremost, Land App is not providing any condition scores to the habitats. We are at a firm stance at the moment that we need an ecologist to confidently get condition assessments. As we get more training data, there might be an ability to assume condition based on some factors, but we do not feel like we have enough data or there's enough information out there and too much local nuance to properly assume condition. So, from where we are at the moment, we won't be assigning condition scores. However, to calculate your biodiversity units, you do need condition scores associated with each of those features. For baseline units, you need a condition score associated with the baseline, and for your uplift units, you also need a condition score associated with your management plan. What we do with the toolbox, and I'll demonstrate this in a moment, is if you don't assign the condition score, we assume both are moderate. What that means is you're only just going to get out the other end your baseline units and anything else you've amended. If you want to get enhancement units, you do need to put into the management plans a condition score uplift. For example, you make the baseline moderate and you make the future plan good, and you can get uplift units through enhancement. Then, the other assumption we've made is that we will add on your behalf, for the calculator, for the estimator, a significant multiplier of that 1.15 to all areas that are within Natural England habitat combined layer. This is a national dataset that we've got hold of, but you can see within Land App, and I'll be demonstrating in a moment, it just gives us quite a nice proxy for strategic significance. Just to reiterate, that isn't fixed, and it is down to the ecologist's discretion who'll let you know whether that is a strategic site. But it just allows us to provide you that proxy. The announcement, I think, back in November did mention the fact that all the local nature recovery strategies that are being developed will help inform the strategic significance. Local nature recovery strategies are devolved datasets, so they're kind of happening at different speeds and slightly different structures, but we are speaking to quite a few counsellors now who are leading the LNRs, and we will endeavour to get them in as and when we can because we think it's a really important driver for things like biodiversity net gain but also things like countryside stewardship, making sure that everyone is fighting the same fight.

Okay, so I'm going to go over to a live demo now. Um, just a reminder, any questions, um, please do use the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen. The first thing to say is just, um, I'm going to assume for most of the demo that you've already got a Land App account. Absolutely fine if you haven't. You know, everything I'm going to show from now is, you know, you can kind of get started straight away. We're at the land app.com, so we're a web-based browser. You can sign up for free by hitting the free account. Um, and if you've already got an account, you can log in. And just to point you towards the case studies I mentioned, if you go into Community, click on case studies, all of those lovely pieces of work that my colleague Kathy, who's on the call, and Tristan have been working on, you can have a read in there. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go from having nothing mapped, no units generated, to having a baseline habitat assessment, a best guess, a Land Management plan, and some uplift units, hopefully in the next 15 or 20 minutes. And I want to demonstrate just the speed in which you can go from having nothing to having quite a lot of information about any one site. So you can see I was practicing earlier with that other demo live, and for those professional users, remember, you can assign it to a team that cap team, okay? So the first thing I've done is I've created an empty map, and I've been dropped on an interactive Basemap. Um, for the demo, I'm going to be flicking between two different Basemaps. I really like Ordnance Survey light, so if you're an Ordnance Survey partner, you can obviously wire in your API key, and if not, you do need to purchase credit, either directly or indirectly, to make sure you can use this dataset. And the other one I will be using as well, just to kind of compare, is the Bing imagery as well. So the first thing is I want to choose a site, and just to make it slightly more interesting so we can test the best guess Baseline, I am going to try and find an area that's got some rivers and also some good priority habitats in. Okay, so this looks like it's got some fun things happening, Lan dry acidic grassland, and I don't know this site at all, so I'm just going to firstly create a boundary of my area of interest and then take you through the steps of getting a BNG plan together. The first thing you want to do is you want to create a boundary that shows your area of interest. The way you do this is you click new, use template, and I want ownership boundary as my option, which I found there. I then going to pick from land registry. In this demo, I don't have an SBI number, although you can do this with an SBI number. Oh, coincidence there, no land registry there. We can build that in the moment. And then what you do is you choose the areas of interest. You can either just select one parcel and you can click on multiple, or you can hold turn this label off, and what that does is that only chooses things within the same title number. So depending on how you want to handle it, you can do it like so, click next and finish. And what I've then got is I've got an area of interest. If you want to add this area, we can do, but I think for the demo, I'm just going to use these land registry areas. So what that includes then is we've got some priority habitats, we've got some good quality improved grasslands, and some other things which will come out of my best guess Baseline. The first thing I want to do is I want to basically merge this into an official ownership boundary and just tidy it up a little bit. So I've selected it all by right-clicking and then using this merge function at the top. And what that's done is that's now just dissolved everything into a single boundary. I then can style this, so for example, I'd give it a nice yellow style just so I know my area of interest. And I can actually tidy up these fragments as well. So for those that are familiar with using land registry, there are occasions where you get this bit of Legacy data. Just to quickly demo how to tidy that up is you can draw a new shape Over the Top by hitting draw and say choosing area, you can then basically just hover around the outside of those messy bits, double click to create kind of that red block, and then you just merge these two together by subtracting the data, kind of hole punching away the mess, and then merging these two together. And you can see now I haven't got any of those Legacy bits that make the site boundary a bit messy.


Other things that I would do as well when I've got this boundary is I would use our T-marks tool. We've got a T-mark, which just indicates which side of the boundary we're working on, and you can draw those fairly easily by clicking on the edge. It should snap the edge, and then drawing your T-mark that automatically looks like this. So I'm not going to do too many, but hopefully you can see the value in spending a bit of time to make that neat. That works particularly well if some of the maps you're printing are really zoomed in, and it's hard to see which side of the hedge or the wall you're working on. So particularly here, it might be good just to have some T-marks that illustrate that the plan and the boundary of interest is here. Okay, that's just to demonstrate those T-marks. The other thing I would do as well is you can put on the area of the site for this site itself. Obviously, I've never been here before. What we'd always recommend doing is using Ordnance Survey Mastermap. And Ordnance Survey Mastermap, as I described in those slides, is the initiator of the best guest Baseline. It's kind of the official outlines and boundaries of things. And to access that, you can hit new, download data, and then there's this Mastermap topography layer that you can choose. You then choose your plan, which in my case is my land registry parcel, and you give your site a name, site A, for example. So this purchase is licensing me as a user for 12 months' use of the OS Mastermap vector, and it's being calculated pretty much bang on a pound per hectare, just over, and it will vary depending on where you are in the country. You hit download now, and then you're given this download data option, which is for you to basically say, am I charging this onto my client or am I taking it as an in cost? If it's for a client, you can obviously add a client code and choose billable, and that will just come out of your monthly report that's sent to your accounts team or anyone on your Billings tab. If it's non-billable, and it's like an at cost to you as an individual, click download now. And what that's done is that's now just sending that boundary to our Ordnance Survey database, and it's going to extract for me all of the features that make up this farm. It takes about 20 seconds to run, and once it's done, you hit refresh on your screen, and you can see now what it's loaded for me is all of the features that make up this estate. So for example, I've got the buildings. I'll turn off the labels for now. I've got the buildings and I've got all these different agricultural fields that have been picked up, including the Woodland, which gives me a really good starting point for understanding, I suppose, the lay of the land. I can see this is mixed Woodland, but the main blocker with this is it's not in the language for biodiversity Net gain. This is in a language that is very useful for creating asset registers and building plans, but it needs some extra understanding, particularly with these grass fields about, you know, is it designated? Is it species rich? Is it more verdant Ry grass? And you can kind of see through the satellite but the difference between, you know, grassland and arable isn't being picked up, etc. And so this is where we've built this UK habitat best guest Baseline in partnership with UKAB Limited. I'm going to demonstrate now, so again you go through the same process of new, download data, but this time you want to choose UK habitat best guest Baseline. You have to search for your valid OS license. So as I've just purchased site A, I can download Lo site A, which is this demo's site, and I'm therefore in license for those. If you've got an existing license, you need to either search for your license in here or get in touch with the support channel by using the support button at the bottom right-hand side of your screen. I can give it a name, site A. If you've got an SBI number, do feel free to put it in. The algorithm that does best guest Baseline just takes a bit of information from the RPA and can assign it, but it isn't necessary. So I'm just going to leave it for now.

You can see then, because I'm on a professional account, I've automatically had a 30% discount to this. So this is working out to be about a pound per hectare again. If I wasn't, it would be 30% more expensive. Hit download now, and exactly the same as before, you can give it a job code, assign it to either billable or non-billable, and hit download now. Now, this process is going to take about five minutes. This isn't quite as easy as just going to get the data from Ordnance Survey. What we are doing behind the scenes now is we are taking each one of these features, including the Woodland, including the grassland, and running it against 15 or 16 different algorithms to provide a best guess of what actually on the ground is. Is it grassland? Is it arable? Is it temporary grassland or is it permanent grassland? Did it have winter cover crops? Did it not? So while that's running in the background, I'm just going to show you three functions that also can help with your BNG assessment. The first one is the collaborate function. So you may want to invite a colleague into this map or a friend or a neighbor, and you can do this by hitting the sharing settings button. It might be behind my head depending on how well formatted your page is at the moment, but you can hit share the map and then type in your colleague's name, for example, ben@landapp.com, and add him as a viewer. Yeah, I'm on the test account so won't get a direct email; this is going live on Tuesday next week, but that's basically now sent Ben a notification in his inbox that I have invited him to my map which is this BNG webinar demo. If he hasn't already got an account he will receive how to activate it and you will receive 101 pound referral credit. If he has already got an account he'll just go to click on the link and log in straight away. The second tool I want to quickly show you is the reports function, and the reports function has two quite powerful bits of information that you can use. The first is the plan summary. And so the plan summary will break down all of the different features I've got in a plan. So at the moment I've just got land registry and OS Master map area for example, but if I run a plan report on the OS Master map area I instantly get a very clean breakdown according to Ordnance Survey about the farm that I'm working on. So how many buildings do they have? They've got 38 buildings within that area. What percentage cover is natural habitat? It is 25%, with 21% of those being mixed Woodland and 2.25% being Conifer Woodland. So you can very quickly from this site start to understand what the layer of the land is in kind of hard asset register figures.


The other thing that you can do in here is run a data layers report. Earlier, when I turned on the priority habitat, that was one of 95 data layers that LandApp has in the system. But you might, for your BNG calculation, need to know a bit more about different designations and whether there's any opportunity for certain habitats, etc. So what I'm going to do is run my land registry boundary through all of the data layers that LandApp has, and I'll get sent a clean report back to say whether I do or do not. Just in the name of time, I'll just do those ones. Demo report, you're done. So what we're doing in this process is basically taking that 90-hectare boundary and quickly comparing it to all the data layers that we've got in our database. So yeah, designations, are there any trip sis, public footpath? What's the length of the public footpath? And a lot of opportunity layers as well. For example, we've been working with the Forest Commission with their England Woodland creation. This report will tell us which layers we intersect and which we don't and why. I'm showing it this way around because if you do it this way, you're toggling on and off loads of different layers. This will tell you which layers you can toggle off, which you should toggle on because we are intersecting them. So for example, we've got 2,146 meters of public right of way. We're in The Forest of Dean. I'm in the dimmer and Plyy Parish, etc., etc., so you're getting quite a nice breakdown, including being in a high spatial priority for Woodland creation according to the Forestry Commission. So this is another little thing when we're building our plan. Maybe Woodland Creation in the right place might be a good thing to do, as well as a bit of water quality, not a lot, and keeping Rivers cool and RI riparian buffers as well. And we're also in a Bine, so these are different targeting layers that allow you to either tell your client the types of habitat they might want to be creating or as a developer, the type of ones you need to avoid. Other than that, we've got priority habitat, we've got Forest, etc., etc., which all should come through our best guess Baseline. Also in this report, we say you don't intersect. So for example, yeah, we don't have any trip sis. There are certain designations you really need to be aware of when you're doing a B assessment, but this report has told me that I don't have any of these designations and therefore gives me a bit more confidence when I'm going on those surveys. This report can be downloaded to Excel as well, by the way, by hitting the download button there. So I'm going back to my map, and in the time that I've been doing that demo, my best guess has arrived. So what's being served is a version of that Ordnance Survey Master map data, but it's way more ready for the biodiversity assessment. So rather than having to walk the fields straight away, I've now got at least the best guess of what's happening on the ground for me to then start thinking about where may I focus my, where should I focus my effort on, my surveying, and where might there be an opportunity for biodiversity net gain applications. So with this particular site, most of this has actually come out of Conifer Woodland. So it said mixed, we've got a lot more Conifer here than what originally was said, plus some of this grassland has been coming out because I assume it's on the priority habitat. So you can see that these two patches of grassland are coming through the priority habitat as good quality, then improved grassland, whereas these two are coming out with modified grassland. So before I've even gone into the field, I get that idea of where the areas of potential higher value grassland might be. I don't think any, there's a tiny bit of temporary grassland, maybe I should have gone more arable, but where there are arable, just to let you know what we do when we're running the assessment is we look at the grass area or the area of Interest the Aral field and firstly just look at the temporal changes in vegetation cover and that allows us to quite easily distinguish between grassland and Arable. For the arable, we look at it and see when it was last bare, and when we say bare, when we don't detect any vegetation cover between the months of November and January or so, and that allows us to start unpicking whether it's temporary or permanent grassland.


This field, for example, although I would question it a little bit, saying that it was bare in December 2022, so we're basically saying it's currently grassland but it's been reseeded at some point in the last two years, which on an ecological survey might be quite hard to see. Or it might just be that it was recently part of a garden. They might have recently seeded that garden, but we get that temporal element at scale about which fields are there and when. And then that also means for detecting things like winter cover, we can, to arable fields, now show you on a map which ones have had their soil over the month of January, November, January, sorry, and which ones did have some form of winter green cover. So we're basically using Earth observation to provide a bit more nuance to your surveying. So when you're stood in a field, you know when that field was last sown. You know, I've personally been on quite a few surveys where you stood in a rye grass field, for example, you don't know if it's a rye grass lay from the last two years or if it's been there for 30 years. The best guess baseline will differentiate between those for you. So these are permanent lays if they come out as modified grassland versus the temporary ones that come out orange. And just to show you the priority habitat that's been picked up, so if I turn on priority habitat, you can see that we've basically been picking up, we've picked up priority habitat woodland, which has come out in here, and also these priority habitat orchards, which hopefully have been assigned traditional orchard codes as well. So the best guess baseline is taken the priority habitat and melded it into a lot of other data sets to give you this single source of best guess. Again, just to reiterate, this isn't to replace an ecological survey, this is to give you instant access to good data. So now I've got my best guess, I just want to quickly whistle through how to build a management plan. So from this, let's just assume these are my two sites because they're two modified grasslands potentially. When you're doing the management plan, you may want to have a little site visit first, but just to show you the tooling, I can choose these two fields as my target areas. I can right-click on them and copy them to a plan. That plan is going to represent my future, and I'm going to bring it over to a land management plan, and I'm going to call this future version one because I'm going to do some scenarios in a moment. So by bringing that over, I'm saying that these are my focus areas for my biodiversity net gain system, and I can now draw these for what I want them to become. So, for example, I can let the corridor around the edge maybe scrub over, so I can assign those a scrub code. I can say with the rest of this, I'm going to maybe do a bit more of a scrubby corner in here, and again, this is just me making things up. And for these, I'm going to try and turn them into a neutral grassland. Okay, my target condition I'm going to turn to good. I want these to be in good condition, and then the scrub, I'm going to leave as blank just to show you what the tool does. Okay, but this could be one scenario which is I'm doing a bit of grassland enhancement and also a bit of scrub creation. I may not know whether that's the right thing I want to do, so I'm going to create another scenario by duplicating this future again into a land management plan, but calling it version two and creating a plan and amending this slightly. So I may, for example, want to do a bit of woodland planting down here, W1G in good condition, and then let's maybe just say, let's see what happens when I go to moderate because the temporal elements of creating good quality grassland can sometimes hinder uplift as well. Okay, so I've now got two scenarios, I've got future V1 and future V2, and I've got a best guess baseline, or now let's assume I've ground-truthed it, which I haven't, but I've got a baseline that I can now run through our new biodiversity toolbox. All of the codes because they've come through, the best guess baseline is down to the right level, apart from, I know there might be some edge cases where we just don't have an especially for the smaller shapes. The Earth observation really struggles, but actually for these two, for example, we've just got grassland which I can manually change to modified grassland, for example. Okay, so you can edit the best guess. It's not going to be perfect. It's the best guess, but it is at least giving you quite a good understanding of what is currently there. Example, I'm just going to bring off this woodland in a slightly ad hoc way which you guys can spend more time doing, but I've improved my baseline and tinkered with it. I haven't ever assigned any condition scores to the baseline, so what I will do just to demonstrate, I will turn this field into a four-condition baseline grain. So I've got four conditions, and this one I've not assigned anything. Okay, now we're ready to create or at least calculate biodiversity units through our new tool. To access it, you have to have your baseline, and then you don't have to have any future plans. If you don't have any future plans, we just tell you the baseline unit, but if you want to calculate uplift, you need a future plan. You access it by clicking the three dots next to the baseline and clicking "toolbox". Within the toolbox, we've released this new button that's called "estimate biodiversity net gain". You click that button and hit run, and what Landa does is it's now basically running that baseline against your two scenarios, so it's going to spit out three layers for me. It's going to set out the baseline scenario which is just the state of play. What are the existing units? Is there? It's going to spit out a plan. There we are. It's already done. Great. It's quick. It's then going to spit out a plan for my version one uplift and my version two uplift. So just to take those in turn. So for example, for my baseline between these two, my baseline units based on their condition, which is moderate and poor, are this value. So my moderate grassland's baseline units is 15, and my poor grassland is at 10.53. Okay, my future scenario then version one, which was just this, exactly the same has happened apart from we've got quite a few more attributes in the right-hand table. So for example, my good condition grassland is generating an uplift of 20 units because of its baseline being 6.43 and its creation units being 26.99. So I'm getting an uplift units. I'm doing this creation of modified grassland to good of 20 units. For this heathland, so for the mixed scrub, we're getting an uplift of 6.97 because the baseline was 2.97 as modified grassland, and then the uplift via creation is 9.94. So you can very quickly on a map start doodling up the different areas, and maybe for these, we could put a let me just do at the same time condition score and maybe the code name so you can see these are the units that we could potentially generate and are therefore marketable through this creation. In contrast, we obviously did a scenario just to see the difference, so I would do exactly the same which I would turn on the condition score, the uplift, and the code name, and you can start to see the difference in units depending on which one you've done. So for example, we've actually got a negative uplift by creating this woodland here. So the creation of that kind of makes sense. The creation of woodland along the edge from moderate grassland going into woodland of good condition is a negative uplift, and the reason for that is the temporal time it takes to get to good woodland. So we've been playing around the net game calculator by trying to achieve wood, you know, an ecologically difficult condition to get to good condition native broadleaf. It takes longer. There's a 30-year lag time, and therefore the units sell are lower. So hopefully, that's given you a bit of an insight into how you can start phrasing designs. All of this can be printed, so we've got, you know, you can print off this as a plan, share it with clients, collaborate, and our print function is found up here. Remember that you can save print templates as well if you've pre-formatted a print template. Actually, I might sply show you here's my plan customize print. I can have a preform, have to template like my B&G plan that's just going to add all the legends, etc., that I did earlier B of blue Peter. You can change the standard of the base map and the color of the base map, make it a bit neater, and then you can purchase it. But the main output you probably want from this is rather than the print, you also want to get the table view. So what we've done is all of that data is now available in the table view, so you can see how those scores were calculated, and those values can be copied and pasted into the official metric. We are working on an official metric populator behind the scenes. At the moment, you need to manually move the data from here to your official calculation. Okay, but hopefully, this is a very dynamic tool. You could see how quick it happens. So in the space of 25 minutes, we've gone from knowing nothing about that site to having a very good estimate of baseline units and also potential through the creation of different habitats and different conditions for those that are using the B&G reports. Remember you can access that within here, and that will start populating, but there is an hour delay on the reports, and that was the main bit of feedback is that with B&G, a lot of people are wanting instant data. And so by using this new uplift tool, you can very quickly calculate potential through the conditions using the different rules that we've set. I hope that's answered your questions and given you a bit of a flavor of what's to come next week. We will be doing a lot of marketing around this, so please do keep your eye out on it. But to reiterate, the best guest baseline is available to all users, but professional users get a heavy discount. And then the B&G tool that I've just been demonstrating is only available to professional users. So please do consider upgrading. Thank you very much.

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