A key aspect of supporting the delivery of Environmental Act targets is to ensure the best available evidence is accessible for decision making; however, issues with coverage and currency of available environmental data can limit effectiveness. This is hard to rectify given the cost and scale required for such extensive surveys, which risks missed opportunities in sustaining or expanding nature recovery. We seek to partially address this by mobilising the extensive plant records collected by expert witnesses of the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI) and identify locations of high botanical importance and value to better aid decision making processes.
BSBI records are collected at hectare (100 × 100m grid cell), monad (1 × 1km grid cell), and tetrad (2 × 2km grid cell) resolutions that we used to create hectare and monad resolution heatmaps, and a monad resolution summarised value map. The heatmaps contain the recorded counts of plant species with a list of Rare, Scarce, or Threatened (RST) species, but the monad resolution also contains a modelled count where the tetrad level records were resolved to a monad scale. The summarised value map provides an easily interpretable map where the value of each monad is categorised as either “Low”, “Medium”, or “High” according to the presence of RST species and/or the estimated proportion of Priority Habitat Positive Indicator and Ancient Woodland Indicator species compared to its surrounding area.
This Technical Information Note provides a detailed account of the methodology and models used to create the products.