Wild East - Visualising space for nature

Project Details

Recreating the ecological networks in GIS across the Wild East area (Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, parts of Cambridgeshire & Lincs) was a mammoth endeavour and relied on prior experience working on the ESRC Regional Green Infrastructure Map across Essex. Acquiring the datasets was the first step, Natural England kindly allowed Wild East a license to access the Hedgerow dataset. This national hedgerow dataset is fascinating and details the past and current state of hedgerows, this was filtered to ensure only the current features in the dataset were kept. The potential to analyse the change in hedgerow extents was briefly explored but at this point out of scope.

Next open-source woodland datasets were combined in such a way as to minimise duplication. Some gap analysis was carried out to evaluate the degree of fragmentation within woodland parcels and the potential for automatically identifying where woodland planting was most needed. It was decided that additional data would need to be sourced to assess the validity of this approach and again somewhat outside the original scope. But still an interesting exercise and valuable at a landscape scale to assess the degree of habitat fragmentation.

Watercourse data was sourced from Open Source data (including OS Open Rivers and Open Street Map) and then carefully managed within a geodatabase to carry out operations such as unioning and buffering. East Anglia is a land of much water and so in order to determine the ‘class’ of a watercourse required a combination of spatial statistics and attribute management. Some fun* was had along the way to determine for example the sinuosity of the watercourse indicating the degree to which the land had been managed. Spatial statistics were used to evaluate the different land uses the watercourses travelled through.

Once the datasets were combined they had to be published in such a way that credits in the ArcGIS Online Cloud were not unnecessarily eaten up and this was where considerable learning took place. Finally, the maps were ready to underpin the Wild East endeavours, why not take a look and pledge some space to nature?

*fun for geospatial nerds

Project Overview

A new geospatial environment was required for Wild East as their project team outgrew the existing offering. Wild East wanted a reliable means to collect pledge information which included the pledge area and a means to showcase the incredible work of the pledgees.

Wild East also dreamt of having a series of basemaps to visualise where nature could thrive given space - wetter, wilder & woodier. A central element of this brief was that the basemaps showing where additional space could be made for nature were representative of the feature being buffered or extended, so, for example, hedgerows required a 5m buffer but watercourse buffers should vary depending on the size of the watercourse. While woods were not buffered there was gap analysis required to determine where woodlands were most fragmented and where planting could quickly make a difference to habitat value.

This project used the Lawton principle - bigger, better, more and joined (see right)

    1. To create a basemap of habitats in East Anglia including a) buffers on hedgerows, b) varying-sized buffers on watercourses dependent on the watercourse size, plus wetland features and c) showing all areas of woodland planting

    2. To set up a means by which people could pledge land and the area being set aside could be accurately counted towards the 250,000 ha target set by the project trustees.

  • A combination of Excel and ArcMap was used to standardise existing pledge data. A new pledge collection process was facilitated via Survey123. Creating a workflow and a dataset showing where space for nature was most needed required Python, QGIS and ArcMap, with ArcPro and ArcGIS Online used to publish and share the data.

    • Using ArcPro and Vector Tile Layers to manage over 4 million features ensured minimal credit usage and maximum rendering speed

    • Cleaning and management of existing pledge data to ensure compliance with GDPR

    • Implementing data standards and data sharing agreements