Ordnance Survey (OS) has created a mapping tool that shows in detail what’s on a plot of land – wetland, woods or bare earth, for example – to help developers plan their biodiversity net gain (BNG) commitments more easily.
Called OS Enhanced Land Cover, the tool runs on OS and third-party land and habitat data and can be used for BNG assessments at early desktop stage and by ecologists in the field.
New laws from the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) oblige developers to assess a site’s baseline habitats using Defra’s biodiversity metric, submit a biodiversity gain plan, and deliver 10% gains onsite – or offsite through credits – while maintaining and monitoring habitats for 30 years.
Last week, Defra confirmed that BNG will become mandatory for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects from this November.
The beta release of OS Enhanced Land Cover combines topography and land cover from the OS National Geographic Database, OS aerial imagery and OS terrain 5 with third-party open habitat data including Natural England’s Living England, the Rural Payments Agency’s Crop Map of England, and UKHab’s classification system, on which the statutory biodiversity metric developers must use is based.
Wessex Water likes it
An early adopter is Wessex Water, which has used the tool to asses hundreds of sites for its 30-year BNG projections.
Linckia is the tech partner that takes OS land cover data and serves it to Wessex Water through its Habitat Fabric dataset and BNG application.
Co-founder of Linckia, Luke Chittock, called the tool “a scalable, authoritative, and auditable approach that we can trust”, adding: “We have seen a 40% reduction in data processing costs from earlier approaches, rising to 90% reduction when compared to processing imagery for the same outcomes.”
Dr Jack Parkin, product manager for the built and natural environment at OS, said the government’s 1.5 million homebuilding target, combined with BNG legislation, has created a surge in demand for ecologists.
“One of the benefits of OS Enhanced Land Cover is to boost the productivity of those ecologists and to make their time count,” he said.
“We aggregate multiple geospatial datasets together to provide a provisional assessment of habitats on the ground which saves ecologists time both in desktop analysis and pre-screening in the field. This can shave days, or even weeks, from development times, and with 1.5 million homes in the pipeline, that could really add up.”
