The Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government has awarded a grant of £210,000 to the Woodland Trust as the first phase of a £1.5 million collaboration with Natural England to update the Ancient Woodland Inventory.
The Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government has awarded a grant of £210,000 to the Woodland Trust as the first phase of a £1.5 million collaboration with Natural England to update the Ancient Woodland Inventory. The need to update the inventory was brought to Parliament’s attention in January when Michael Fabricant MP successfully introduced an unopposed bill seeking an update in England – for more details click here.
While the inventory has been updated in some areas of England to draw upon digitised map sources and to increase its resolution to take in woodlands down to 0.25 hectares in size over the previous 2 hectare resolution used for the original inventory work, many parts of England have still to see the inventory updated. This work will plug this gap.
Sylvan welcomes this announcement which should lead to the identification of additional areas of ancient woodland in England. Where these woodlands are correctly identified this is good news for the protection of this valuable resource. However, the update to the inventory will typically only consult a limited array of desktop source material and will carry out only targeted ground truthing, such that it is anticipated to still be classed as only ‘provisional’ in nature, pending the availability of further information. Accordingly, even after the update, there will likely be an increased need for Sylvan’s niche skillset to carry out further in-depth assessments of the ancientness of woodlands, drawing on the full array of available evidence, so as to test the accuracy of the provisional identification.
