1 Reply by Darwyn Sumner (LERC)

  • Darwyn Sumner (LERC)
  • Veteran
  • Offline
  • Registered: 07-06-2006
  • Posts: 176

Re: Site boundaries, UKBAP habitats & biotopes

Take a look at the interactive map on the Gateway. Here it is possible to select a range of site types.
At the moment this comprises a number of different statutory types, administrative boundaries, reserve boundaries and non-statutory sites. The SNH & EN influence is clearly very strong in the range of sites which are available.
Many of us in LRCs are also involved in the UKBAP process at some level, be it through their local BAP partnerships or involvement in EN-funded projects (such as the regional grassland inventories).
There are strong demands within LRC and BAP partnerships for habitat-based BAPs to be made more widely available through GIS (see Recorder's biotopes in "Biodiversity Action Plan Priority Habitats" & "Biodiversity Action Plan Broad Habitat Classification" or visit the BARS website at  http://www.ukbap-reporting.org.uk/plans/nonj.asp).
At Leicestershire & Rutland we are looking at a means of combining Recorder XML outputs and our GIS to regularly publish GIS layers of all our BAP habitats onto a website.
How nice it would be if it were possible also to submit such layers to the NBN Gateway as site boundaries. It would take some considerable time before layers for the entire UK were achieved but a start could be made on some of the more manageable biotopes (how about limestone pavement or sheltered muddy gravels?)
Such a facility would enable some very interesting biotope-related research to be carried out using the NBN Gateway, for example Rob's analysis at http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?id=154 might be made easier for him and species/biotope relationships become apparent.
How feasible is all this and who else is interested.

2 Reply by charlesroper

  • charlesroper
  • charlesroper
  • Digital Development Manager
  • Offline
  • From: Field Studies Council
  • Registered: 26-03-2006
  • Posts: 906

Re: Site boundaries, UKBAP habitats & biotopes

Very interesting idea, Darwyn. I've passed your message onto our BAP partnership officer to see what she thinks.

Charles

Charles Roper
Digital Development Manager | Field Studies Council
http://www.field-studies-council.org | https://twitter.com/charlesroper | https://twitter.com/fsc_digital

charlesroper's Website

3 Reply by Jim Munford

  • Jim Munford
  • OPAL
  • Offline
  • Registered: 22-08-2006
  • Posts: 4

Re: Site boundaries, UKBAP habitats & biotopes

I like Darwyn's sugestion, but might I suggest that, given the advances we are making with web services from the Gateway and the interest being shown by LRC in using them, an equally useful layer would be Local Wildlife Sites as this would facilitate producing species lists for these.

4 Reply by andyb

  • andyb
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 01-09-2006
  • Posts: 22

Re: Site boundaries, UKBAP habitats & biotopes

Hi there, Darwyn,

Hosting habitat layers on the Gateway has been an aspiration for the NBN Trust for a considerable time. The potential for BAP reporting and brand new studies on the relationship between species occurrences and habitats is enormous.
However, the technical challenges are also large and this has delayed development in this area. In fact, we had hoped to include habitats when the Gateway was officially launched but this was dropped at the time so that we could ensure we got the presentation of species data right.

One workaround that we could try is what you've suggested. We could load habitat polygons as sites and then generate 'habitat reports' in exactly the same way as the Gateway handles site reports. I think this might be worth a trial with LERC/LCC. I do mean to discuss this with the development team to see if they anticipate any problems ... and if they will let me go ahead with a trial at all!

To give you some idea of the issues, we now regularly load and update a broad range of wildlife sites. In many cases these have been through at least some validation within the organisations that holds them. However, we find that only around 50% or so of these layers can be loaded onto the Gateway without any technical problems.
We receive boundaries as shape files or mapinfo interchange format but we have to import these into ArcSDE (spatial database engine). ArcSDE is far less tolerant of topological errors than the formats we receive the files in and this is what causes us trouble. LERC's SINCs have been unusual in not having many problems here.

Currently, we are working on a standard operating procedure for dealing with new site boundary layers so that we can quickly identify and fix problems internally. Soon this will be translated into guidance for organisations that wish to submit boundary layers so that they can validate and correct any problems at source before sending layers to us - rather like the mechanism (exchange format and validator) we have for species data. It's been a lot of work for the service team.

And this is just sites that we already cater for! As far as we can tell, site boundaries will have been through far more validation than habitat layers so we are wary of taking habitats on in the short term.

On top of that there are the issues around how we integrate habitat layers from different sources; whether or not we attempt to cross-match different habitat classifications; what sort of precision we can handle and so on.

We definitely want to try this but it's a big job. The Trust is currently scoping how we can cater for all of this and also what the data providers and users will want. Unfortunately, what we're unliklely to do is just 'give it a go' and tack something on to the existing Gateway. I'm sure the scoping study will be informed by any trial we do with LERC/LCC.

Best wishes,
andyb