Following the revision of the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park (LLTTNPA) boundaries and derivation of the LLTTNPA-wide UK Priority Habitats coverage file, LUC was commissioned to audit the existing information on biodiversity within the LLTTNPA.
Within the LLTTNPA, 20 Priority Habitats from the UK Biodiversity Action Plan have been recorded, including upland oakwoods, rivers, wet woodlands, upland heathland and blanket bog. These are habitats which are considered priorities for national conservation efforts, either because they are intrinsically rare or because they support exceptional assemblages of plants and animals. Our biodiversity audit will provide an invaluable conservation tool for focusing future management of priority habitats within the LLTTNPA.
An audit of biodiversity within the LLTTNPA has never before been undertaken on this scale. A wealth of information from a large number of sources was available from within the LLTTNPA, which LUC systematically processed, analysed and transformed into a form that could be readily used — both by the NP Authority to assist their decision making and as information for other organisations with an interest in the LLTTNPA. To make this ‘jigsaw’ coherent, we not only had to have the right building blocks, but more importantly, to arrange them in a way that created a meaningful picture.
The challenge of this project proved to be the differences between the various raw datasets available to the LLTTNPA. Many of the survey files dated back a number of decades or were compiled in different GIS formats by different authors, thus LUC undertook a significant amount of data cleansing work prior to the data amalgamation and transformation.
We used GIS scripting to automate the processes required to sort the large amount of data. Then following on from the GIS-based analysis of geometry, we applied our ecological expertise to resolve the conflicts in the ecological information, aided by high-resolution aerial photography and base map data.
The amalgamated Phase1 map and amalgamated NVC map have proved extremely useful to the client. We have subsequently devised ecological matrices, enabling the translation of various habitat types found within the LLTTNPA into UK Priority habitats.
