Living Wales Habitats

Welsh Government and Natural Resources have a common aspiration to develop a new, comprehensive, and updatable Habitat Map of Wales to provide spatial information on priority habitats. Harmonised/unified temporal maps of habitats are essential for delivery of sustainable management and natural resources and effective land-use decision making in Wales by public bodies and the land management sector at large. Living Wales has provided national land cover maps annually from 2020 onwards for Wales but other static maps also exist (e.g., Phase 1, Phase 2). In each case, field data have been used to support the mapping but these have not been combined. Hence, the aim of this work is to a) appraise previous reviews of Phase 1 and Living Wales comparisons to identify differences and commonalities, b) Identify where and when field data alone are essential to ground truth habitat types and how these can be collated, and c) prepare materials to be used in mapping WG and NRW stakeholder requirements. This 1 month project builds on existing information and knowledge held by Aberystwyth University.