Ordnance Survey develops a ready-to-use land and habitat data tool to help with Biodiversity Net Gain

Ordnance Survey (OS) has come up with a ready-to-use tool for rural and urban developers in England to support their target of providing a ten per cent Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG).  

Defra’s BNG legislation means that as part of planning applications, land and property developers are required to assess baseline habitats using Defra’s biodiversity metric, submit a biodiversity gain plan, deliver ten per cent gains on- or offsite through credits, and maintain and monitor habitats for 30 years. Last week, Defra confirmed that BNG will become mandatory for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects from this November.

OS Enhanced Land Cover (ELC) Beta provides an efficient tool to support the new BNG challenges, potentially speeding up the Government’s ambition to build 1.5 million homes during this Parliament. It is a foundational dataset combining topography and land cover from the OS National Geographic Database, OS aerial imagery and OS terrain 5 with a range of third- party open habitat data. This includes information from Natural England’s Living England, the Rural Payments Agency’s Crop Map of England and UKHab’s classification system. UKHab is the UK standard classification for referring to habitats and underpins the statutory biodiversity metric which developers must use.

Most significantly, the product can be used to conduct BNG assessments – both for early workflow desktop analysis and for use by ecologists in the field. Developers, landowners, and ecologists can also better understand the composition of their land cover at scale before conducting more detailed surveys. For example, Wessex Water has used OS ELC data to understand the biodiversity of hundreds of sites in one spatial picture and apply this data to their 30-year projections for BNG.