As authorities across England prepare their Local Nature Recovery Strategies (LNRS), Alex Waechter, records centre manager, reflects on how HERC and its local partners have been at the forefront of mobilising data to inform decision making in Herts over the past decade.
LNRS have the aim of producing map-based information to guide targeted action for wildlife and biodiversity alongside other environmental benefits such as carbon offsets and natural flood management. The LNRS map data will be built on the principles of ecological connectivity (bigger, better, more joined-up) and local distinctiveness. Conservation priorities based on what is special and vulnerable in our county will be agreed and datasets will be combined in order to map where action for those priorities could be carried out to maximum effect - i.e. where they will contribute to expanding, strengthening and joining up existing patches of habitat or particular species populations. The LNRS is a national, legislated initiative, but it is by no means the first time we in Herts have been thinking along these lines.
The Herts Ecological Network Maps (HEN)
In 2011-13, a new complete map of habitats across the entire county was produced, using ecological and GIS expertise at Herts and Middlesex Wildlife Trust, years of field evidence collected by the then-Hertfordshire Biological Records Centre, and the latest available aerial imagery provided by Herts County Council. At the time, we were one of few counties to have such a resource.
This habitat inventory was used to generate potential habitat network maps for five broad groupings of habitats, chosen for their local significance: neutral grassland, chalk grassland, acidic open habitats (such as acid grassland and heath), wetland habitats, and broad-leaved woodland. Potential habitat network maps identify how our habitats are spatially related to each other and where the highest priorities are for expanding them and linking them together. Sound familiar? For any parcel of land in the county, the HEN map gives an indication of whether the land is already semi-natural habitat with potential for conservation, restoration or enhancement, and if not, the priority for habitat creation (low, medium, high) based on how close it is to existing good habitat. It also provides a recommendation for what type of habitat it might be suitable to create.
This strategic approach ensures that efforts can be targeted to where they are of most potential benefit. It also ensures that the right combination of habitats are created in the right places, reflecting historical context and physical factors, and minimising unintended consequences of locking out the potential to restore functioning networks of one habitat for the sake of another.
The HEN map was last updated by HERC in 2017 and is provided as an extra bonus with our data search outputs and with neighbourhood plan requests. It has also been shared with Herts County Council and all our supporting District Councils alongside guidance as to how it can be used in the planning system.
While the LNRS map outputs are being prepared, the HEN maps are forming the basis for calculations of strategic significance for Biodiversity Net Gain calculations in the interim, with the agreement of our local planning authorities.
As part of the Herts LNRS Partnership, we are working to ensure that our local habitat data, and the experience of producing the HEN map, are incorporated into the LNRS mapping process. Beyond the LNRS mapping process, we will continue to work to update and improve our habitat data. Our detailed data holdings, user-tailored visualisations and data products will continue to be indispensable to anyone working towards nature recovery in the county, alongside the LNRS maps.
Further reading: More detail on the production of the HEN map
Hertfordshire's State of Nature
Hertfordshire's State of Nature report assessed over 7,500 different species and how their numbers changed between 1970 and 2020. The results were based on over 2.8 million species records held by the Herts Environmental Records Centre. Taking inspiration from the national State of Nature report, first published in 2013, this report was the first of its kind to focus in such detail on Hertfordshire's wildlife and wild places.
Out of this mammoth work, a new local list of conservation priority species was identified - over 1500 Herts Species of Conservation Concern, species that have gone extinct (or extinct as a breeding species) since 1970, rare species, species whose numbers have significantly declined or distributions have significantly contracted since 1970, and species for which Hertfordshire has a particular responsibility, housing isolated or edge populations.
HERC maintains this list as a 'living' list in our database and our reporting, subject to change as species distributions continue to evolve and as we learn more about them. It has so far been once reviewed, in 2022, and the current list stands at 1509 Herts Species of Conservation Concern, of which 1430 are rare/threatened, 75 are extinct since 1970, and 25 are considered Herts Responsible.
HERC works closely with the expert County Recorders of the Hertfordshire Natural History Society (HNHS). This relationship was integral to the production of the Herts State of Nature report, which combined national status information, trend information from the data held by HERC, and expert judgment of the County Recorders and some National Recorders where no local expert was available.
The HSCC list, the advice of the County Recorders and research from elsewhere are already helping to direct targeted species conservation action in the county; from projects looking to stabilise or expand vulnerable populations of single species, to wider landscape-scale projects looking to provide benefits for whole assemblages of target species.
It is not always known why a given species is rare, or why it has declined. However, in compiling such information for all the Herts Species of Conservation Concern, where available, certain recurring themes emerge: for example, there is a suite of woodland specialists, such as the Hazel dormouse Muscardinus avellanarius and Nightengale Luscinia megarhynchos, that seem to be particularly vulnerable to the loss of woodland structure (field flora layer, mid-layer) due to various factors such as deer browsing and over-maturation of trees in woodlands that have ceased to be traditionally managed. Such themes can provide a useful evidence-base for targeting and refining nature recovery actions to have as wide a benefit as possible, and some of these are likely to feature in the LNRS.
HERC has a history of working collaboratively with local experts, decision makers and conservationists to ensure that the data holdings we maintain are interpreted, contextualised and visualised, and ultimately translated into action for wildlife. The current LNRS chapter continues that story.
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