8 minute read
A database with character
Supporting the energy transition with Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment site work in the Highlands. © AECOM
The Landscape Character Assessment (LCA) Database includes over 500 LCAs from local to regional scale across the UK and Ireland, offering a single digital resource for landscape character data now and in the future.
Our diverse landscapes provide the context of social and environmental change, not least as society looks to address the climate emergency and biodiversity crisis. As we develop approaches to embracing this change, our landscapes will need the utmost care and consideration to avoid their diversity being lost.
The Royal Society estimates in its Multifunctional Landscapes paper (2023) that by 2050 the UK would need additional land twice the size of Wales, or 18% of the total UK land area, to meet the sum of the net zero and biodiversity policy targets. To respond to these demands, there is an urgent need to understand the landscape to facilitate informed decisions and enable positive, resilient landscape change.
While we are not suggesting that all landscapes should be preserved, or that change should be stopped, we need to identify what makes given landscapes special and reflect this in the changes. We also need to consider people and what they value about their local landscapes. Landscape
Character Assessment (LCA) is one of the key tools which supports this understanding.
The LCA Database for the UK and Ireland provides a single resource for all professions needing to access landscape character data now and in the future. The resource has links to over 500 landscape character assessments at a variety of scales from regional, county and district, to designated landscapes and local assessments, providing the profession and wider users with considerable data efficiency.
Database development
In December 2020, Charlotte Williams CMLI spoke at a Landscape Institute webinar on ‘Understanding the Value of Spatial Data’, which covered landscape character assessment and the difficulties with knowing what documentation may be available and how to find it. Most importantly, as part of that presentation, a call for volunteers was put out which initiated a project to review and pull together a single resource containing publicly available landscape character assessment information.
Initially, the project prompted interest from 12 volunteers in January 2021, growing to 33 volunteers by November 2021. By this time the project was supported by public bodies that shared the vision and understood the benefits of the resource, including Natural England, NatureScot, Natural Resources Wales, Transport Infrastructure Ireland and the Northern Ireland Environment Agency. Meetings over this period involved splitting volunteers into the Landscape Institute branch regions to organise the resource, discussing engagement with others where relevant, governance of the spreadsheet and working through the targeted stages of the project. Much of the work done by the volunteers involved manual searching through local authority pages to find links to the relevant LCAs, eventually populating a spreadsheet.
The project included a consultation period (1 March 2022 – 20 June 2022) during which Landscape Institute members, local authorities and other stakeholders were invited to feed back and contribute further to the resource. To support this a webinar was held in May 2022, with the team evaluating responses and taking these into consideration. In March 2023, the spreadsheet was published, which included feedback from the webinar and consultation period. Ongoing feedback and updates are critical to the success of the database and following a collation of responses the database was refreshed in December 2023. We encourage continued engagement and feedback on this.
A number of decisions had to be made when creating the spreadsheet. Currently, landscape and seascape character assessments are included in the database, but the spreadsheet does not make reference to historic landscape character assessment, townscape character assessment or landscape sensitivity or capacity assessment, except where they are contained within the LCA. This is mainly due to the amount of data and available volunteers, but with more interest and resources, further assessments could be included in the future. The spreadsheet is also limited to the latest LCA, but superseded assessments are being stored within a separate database for the future.
We recognise that it is often helpful to refer to these documents to understand landscape change but there isn’t currently the functionality to include them.
Working with Natural England
Natural England takes a leadership role on landscape character assessment. It publishes and has recently relaunched National Character Area (NCA) profiles onto an interactive web-based platform,3 on which users are now able to find an NCA profile by searching a map, rather than a static list. At the bottom of the front page of the NCA profiles is a link to the LCA database, highlighting the nested nature of character assessments from the NCA profiles to LCAs across a range of scales.
Natural England also publishes the guidance for producing LCAs for England and Wales. As this document is now ten years old it is being updated to reflect current and future needs of our landscapes and those of the document’s users. Earlier this year Landscape Institute members and many others participated in a survey and workshops where views were collected on the guidance and what needs to be updated, but also on LCAs themselves. The likely future demands on our landscapes for the next ten to twenty years were set out in Natural England’s Future Landscapes paper, which was hosted on the LCA Hub.
At Natural England, staff have been involved in the evolution of the LCA Database, both as individuals in the organisation providing volunteering time, but also through chairing the project working group, which was set up to explore opportunities for future development of the database. Representatives from the Landscape Institute, Natural England and private practice make up this group.
Next steps
What are the next steps for the LCA Database? The first one is working towards a searchable spatial GIS platform, taking the lead from the NCA profiles website. A pilot project has been completed in collaboration with an undergraduate researcher funded by the University of Sheffield to begin developing a searchable database. The findings of this project will feed into the new digital database to include the full suite of LCAs across the country (including the devolved nations) searchable by administrative or LCAspecific boundary.
In the future, there may be opportunities to expand the search facility by adding shape file data according to character area and type for each LCA, or combining the LCA database with the NCA profiles for full integration. More information on this next phase of the LCA Database will be communicated through the LI in due course.
For the time being, the more people who use the LCA Database and send feedback, the more we can advance this valuable resource. Tell other people about it, send us updates and new records and ensure the LCA Database is used far and wide across the sector. We would love to hear from you.
Charlotte Williams is a Senior Landscape Architect at AECOM and a Chartered Member of the Landscape Institute.
Jacqui Jobbins is a chartered landscape architect and a Landscape Senior Specialist at Natural England.
LCA and Natural England’s Environmental Benefits from Nature Tool
Andrew Thompson, Senior Officer for Strategy at Natural England and project manager for the EBNT
The Environmental Benefits from Nature Tool (EBNT) provides a powerful means of engaging with the wider Environmental Net Gain (ENG) agenda, aiding cross-discipline collaboration and improving multifunctional, nature-based service delivery to address the challenges of the future. The spreadsheet tool is designed to work in a similar way to the Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) Metric and combines its outputs with contextual information to improve broader consideration and outcomes from development. The tool is now being updated to bolster landscape consideration through incorporation of the LCA Database, with support from the Landscape Institute.
Developed by Natural England and Oxford University with support from the Environment Agency, Forestry Commission and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), the EBNT is designed to help the government’s 25 Year Environment Plan commitment to expand net gain approaches currently used for BNG to include natural capital approaches. Since its initial launch in 2001, the voluntary tool has seen strong uptake and is now referenced in National Planning Practice Guidance. The updated tool is expected to be published autumn 2024. As a key and influential audience, members of the landscape profession are encouraged to try the new tool and feed back their experiences to shape ongoing improvements.
Find out more by contacting ebn@naturalengland.org.uk
