And it’s not just us, projects can be found across the country – from farming clusters to wildlife trusts, landscape recovery projects to supermarkets. Here, we dive into some of the leading landscape-scale projects that Land App supports, and how their holistic focus is delivering for the environment and people…
Working at the landscape scale has proven benefits, like restoring nature and improving biodiversity, reducing flood risks, and increasing carbon capture and storage. Such projects often create jobs and boost the local economies, whilst also aiming to improve public health and wellbeing. There are many fantastic landscape recovery projects happening across the country right now, so we wanted to highlight a few that inspire us. We are thrilled to be supporting the following projects:
Wendling Beck Environmental Project
The Wendling Beck Environment Project (WBEP) is a pioneering habitat creation, nature restoration and regenerative farming project, spanning almost 2,000 acres of land north of the market town of Dereham in Norfolk, UK. The project is a collaboration between private landowners, local authorities, environmental NGOs, and Anglian Water. It aims to transform land use for ecological benefit, whilst also building community and environmental resilience.
“The Land App platform works particularly well in large collaborative projects with multiple landowners – it gives us the ability to play around with different land-use scenarios. Once we had the basics mapped, Land App were really supportive in layering in additional data sets like habitat connectivity, water pathways and historical map data, which are key pieces of information for project decision making and understanding how to get the right habitat, or nature-based solution, in the right place”.
Glenn Anderson, Wendling Beck Environment Project
Find out more about the project, here.
North East Cotswolds Farmer Cluster project
Made up of 137 farms covering 42,000 hectares, this project is a landscape-scale regeneration of the farmed environment and local food networks in the North East Cotswolds through collaboration and knowledge exchange. They aim “to grow into an inclusive and proactive group of local farmers, growers, landowners, foresters and advisers who work and learn together to enhance the natural capital on their land, tackle the climate emergency and build more resilient food and farming businesses.”
Find out more about the project, here.
North Norfolk: Wilder, Wetter, Better for Nature
The project is creating an entirely new wildlife habitat from current arable land – filling in habitat gaps to create a contiguous habitat area 13,470 hectares in size. It will also create and enhance nature corridors along four chalk rivers (480 ha). In total, 1425 ha of additional wildlife-rich habitat will be created to link already protected sites, providing more diverse and better-connected habitats.
Find out more about the project, here.
Breckland Farmers Wildlife Network project
A farmer-led group collaborating to create a landscape-scale wildlife network. Made up of 52 members and covering over 44,000 hectares of farmland in the Brecks, they are the largest farmland cluster in the lowland UK. The project is aiming to build an ecologically significant, science-based and landscape scale network of habitats linked through farms, between sensitive sites, and through areas of high yield agriculture.
Find out more about the project, here.
Wylye Chalk Stream Project
This collaborative effort aims to rejuvenate the vitality, diversity, and ecological abundance of the Wylye Valley. The focus is to restore the river’s natural connection with its floodplain across a 20km stretch of currently under-utilised farmland. This will enhance the river’s resilience to extreme temperatures and flows resulting from climate change. It will also increase its capacity to capture and mitigate harmful excess nutrients and pollutants from the broader landscape.
Find out more about the project, here.
“The Land App is a very impressive tool: the simple, intuitive user experience hides the hugely complex and detailed processes that power it. It is a great way of working with many rich and adaptable datasets such as our ranking and prioritisation of nature-based solutions, as it simplifies data integration to extract valuable insights”
Angus Middleton, Viridian Logic
Adur River Restoration Project
Bringing together 27 farmers and land managers across the Adur Valley, this project will explore ways to revive floodplains, increase biodiversity and improve water quality. It makes use of interventions such as re-meandering, re-naturalisation of floodplains, removal of barriers and embankments, new habitat creation, and improvement of soil health through regenerative farming techniques. They aim to connect significant sites of nature recovery in the catchment and create a new ribbon of habitats running through a wildlife-friendly farmed landscape. The Adur flows through a highly populated area with complex land ownership so this project will focus on collaboration, open learning and public engagement.
Find out more about the project, here.
Weald to Waves
A nature recovery corridor from the High Weald to the Sussex coast and revived seas, encompassing over 20,000 hectares of contiguous habitat, promoting vital ecosystem services – clean water, fertile soils, pollination, carbon capture and flood control. This will involve sustainable farming along the corridor, and across Sussex, to protect and enhance those services. It should also reduce the pollutants that are compromising our landscape, and flowing into our waterways and marine environment.
Find out more about the project, here.
River Test to Itchen Farm Cluster
Combining the efforts of some 40 farmers across 40,000 acres, the farming cluster is a testament to how impactful coordinating Countryside Stewardship (CS) across a landscape can be. The project has a wide scope; from integrating agroecological principles into farming (using CS grants), restoring and improving highly distinctive chalk stream catchments, and forestry management for improved woodland health. Read our Case Study here
Find out more about the project, here.
“Land App has a window in which it can pioneer – it can provide the farmer with the tools to manage the conservation resource on their farm with their neighbours at the landscape scale”
Alison Field, Facilitator and Land App User
Farmer Guardians of the Upper Thames
This farmer-led collaboration focuses on the communities in the Upper Thames at risk of flooding. Since 2015 they have implemented long-term environmental improvements across 16,000 hectares of land; from the river’s source at Kemble to Cricklade in Wiltshire. Many positive outcomes have emerged; including increased biodiversity and wildlife habitats such as woodland, improved water quality and healthier soil as well as natural flood management to reduce flood risk. A key factor in the growing successes of the fund is down to the farmer’s collaboration; they meet on one another’s holdings to discuss the priorities and share knowledge, as well as lessons learned in order to organise new and forward-thinking approaches to flood management.
Find out more about the project, here.
So, what are the benefits of using Land App?
What value do we bring to all these projects?
Using Land App, you can:
- Quickly identify where grouped land parcels fit together
- Control and own your data ownership.
- Make use of our industry-leading permissions structure
- Use our easy drawing tool for designing plans
- Visualise the plans at the landscape scale through Map of Maps
We are proud to support so many wonderful landscape-scale recovery projects and will continue to provide and innovate our mapping tools to make this sophisticated approach more streamlined, effective and pioneering.
Interested in working with us on your own landscape recovery project? Get in touch today at sales@thelandapp.com.
