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Topic: New Priority Habitats' Inventory for England

Natural England’s new Priority Habitats’ Inventory is now available.

The single habitats’ layer project was initiated in April 2012 to incorporate the existing twenty-four separate inventories into a single GIS layer, addressing overlaps and inconsistencies with other datasets. 

The layer has been produced through a largely automated process to identify the main habitat for each OS MasterMap polygon.  A series of rules have been used to interpret the existing habitat inventories alongside Environmental Stewardship and SSSI data.  The rules considered the spatial fit and correspondence between the source datasets to determine the most likely main habitat in a particular area.  A series of manual checks were then undertaken to validate the outputs.

The results of the work mean that a first national layer has now been completed, consisting of nearly 900,000 habitat polygons, which will replace the current suite of 24 separate inventories.

The layer can be downloaded from the Natural England website (Publications, Maps and Data > Data > GIS Digital Boundary Datasets).  The layer comes in four parts:

Priority habitat inventory (north-eastern England)
Priority habitat inventory (north-western England)
Priority habitat inventory (south-eastern England)
Priority habitat inventory (south-western England)

Please email any feedback and comments to the NE Habitat Inventories Team: habitatinventories@naturalengland.org.uk