Indicative Map for New Woodland Planting

In the Forest Service Business Plan for 2007/2008, we set a target to 'Publish Indicative Maps for Afforestation' in Northern Ireland showing where we would encourage new woodland planting. We used our Geographical Information System (GIS) to identify where new planting could potentially be the best long term land use and where new woodland planting could cause a negative impact on existing environmental features. We will continue to develop this document to target new woodland planting where it will be most environmentally and socially valuable.

Approach and methods used

The decision to use GIS was taken as the only appropriate tool to complete this work and a staged approach was taken to build up the information as follows:

Identify relevant environmental and geographical datasets.
Quality assure datasets for completeness and accuracy.
Categorise datasets for impact.
Identify major stakeholders.

We reviewed the data and judged the following areas to be generally unavailable for new planting:

Ramsar Convention sites
Areas of Special Scientific Interest
Areas of Scientific Interest
Scheduled Monuments
Scheduled Monument Zones
Special Protected Areas
Hen Harrier Special Protected Areas
Special Areas of Conservation
Breeding Wader Areas
Land over 300m
Peat (all types)

The following areas are considered to be available for planting subject to constraints:

Red Squirrel Preferred Areas
Designed Landscapes
Areas of Significant Archaeological Interest
Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty

Application of information

After reviewing the available data and discussion with Woodland Trust we produced a map entitled 'Land Generally Available for New Woodland' highlighting three general land types across Northern Ireland:

Land generally available for planting,
Land available for planting subject to constraints and,
Land generally unavailable for planting.

Future

We intend to add to this analysis by targeting new woodland planting within the areas of land generally available for planting by making use of data on ecological networks, habitat potential modelling and social need as it becomes available.

March 2008