These maps show the baseline scoring for woodland opportunity across England (left) and (right) the adjusted scores showing greater opportunties (lighter green) and greater constraints (orange to red).
These maps show the baseline scoring for woodland opportunity across England (left) and (right) the adjusted scores showing greater opportunties (lighter green) and greater constraints (orange to red).
Land Use Opportunity Mapping
Mapping the opportunities for your land use
Land use change is a key part of reducing carbon emissions and scaling up carbon sequestration across your region. Depending on your landscape, you could be looking at a mixture of woodland creation, peatland restoration and/or regenerative agriculture.
Changing the way a landscape looks needs careful engagement with the communities and landowners who work in, travel to and call that landscape home. Your communities need to be able to examine the landscape in detail, recognising that there can be differences between very small parcels of land. They also need to know that an array of factors has been included in a detailed assessment of how suitable the land is for the proposed changes.
As policymakers, you need to know that the indicative land use opportunity scores will factor in other priorities for the land, such as food production, flood mitigation and protection of key habitats and species.
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Our opportunity maps show you detailed and realistic targets for land use change.
Ambitious and achievable targets for woodland creation, peatland restoration and rollout of regenerative agriculture need to balance the local ecological potential for creating new and enhancing existing habitats in your region with multiple opportunities and constraints arising from your policy priorities.
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Our spatial land use opportunity mapping has been developed through working with all 15 National Parks across England, Wales and Scotland, as well as several National Landscapes, Local Authority District and Counties, and private estates.
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Figures show woodland opportunity mapping for the Lake District National Park, and deep peat condition mapping for Lancaster District.
Our woodland opportunity mapping, which is currently available for England, is based on over 50 national data layers. It lets you balance ecological and policy factors for tree planting, using a collection of the best available data and a transparent methodology to show realistic tree planting ambition and most suitable planting areas with high spatial resolution across your region. The default England-wide mapping can also incorporate your custom data and be tuned to reflect your local priorities.
Our peatland opportunity mapping is based on the latest England Peat Map by Natural England and the UK GHG Inventory peat data by the UK CEH. It sets local restoration targets in line with the national targets set by the Climate Change Committee.
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Our regenerative agriculture mapping uses the Living England habitat map by Natural England and the Land Cover Map by the UK CEH to identify suitable areas and set targets for agroforestry, hedgerows, species-rich grassland and cover crops.
Detailed mapping to help with policy setting and engagement
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Engage with individual landowners, with detailed mapping that can zoom to individual properties and show scores for each 10 m2 parcel of land.
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Add to the underlying data from your local knowledge of your land.
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Adjust the scoring based on your policy priorities across food production, flood mitigation, habitat creation and connection, protecting specific habitats and species, access to green spaces, and other natural and social capital benefits.
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Use the map to apportion science-based national targets to any local area.
How we score land for new woodland planting
Our mapping sets a score from 0 to 1 for the potential of a packet of land for new woodland creation.
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Baseline is set from 2 datasets and multiple exclusion zones
We start with 2 different datasets to create our baseline scores:
ESC (Forestry Research’s Ecological Site Classification model) gives a suitability score form 0 to 1 for new tree growth based on local soils and climate.
ALC (Agricultural Land Classification) gives a grade for how suitable the land is for food production. We exclude the highest agriculturally productive ALC Grade 1 and Grade 2 land. We also split the medium-productive ALC Grade 3 land into four sub-grades and convert the resulting grades into numerical scores similar to those in the ESC dataset.
Some land has characteristics that make it unsuitable for woodland creation. We add exclusion zones for any land that contains:
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ALC Grades 1 and 2
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Deep peat (as identified by the latest England Peat Map)
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Schedueld Monuments and Archaeological Sites (identified by Historic England)
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Existing woodland (identified by the National Forestry Inventory by Forest Research)
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Selected priority habitats like saltmarshes (identified by the Priority Habitat dataset by Natural England)
Our baseline score is the mean of the ESC and ALC scores in each grid cell outside the exclusion zones.
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Habitats can add opportunities and constraints
We then look at multiple other land features across the landscape which either show higher premiums (opportunities) for tree planning in the given areas or identify additional constraints. The opportunities include targeted catchment area tree planting to reduce flood risks downstream and connecting existing woodlands. The constraints include efforts to enhance and connect other important habitats such as heathlands and wildflower meadows, and to protect important open habitat bird species.
We use multiple layers to establish additional opportunities and constraints for tree planting:
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Working with Natural Processes (from the Environment Agency)
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Habitat Networks Connectivity (from Natural England)
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Priority Habitats (from Natural England), both those excluding SSSIs and those with SSSIs
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Important Bird Areas (from the RSPB)
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Wader Zonal Map (Forestry England)
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These maps show how the baseline scoring and adjustments combine;
Left: the baseline scoring for woodland opportunity across England.
Middle: The adjustments to scores showing greater opportunities (lighter green) and greater constraints (orange to red).
Right: Our final woodland opportunity map based on combination of the previous two maps. Different shades of green represent relative suitability for tree planting in each 10m pixel (scored from 0 to 1). Grey areas are unsuitable for tree planting.
Adjustments are based on your policies and priorities
Your team are the experts on your land region, and on your priority policies that will influence land use change. You may have islands of habitats such as ancient woodland fragments. Connecting them with habitat corridors could be a priority for your nature recovery and access to green space policies. If you have communities facing an increased risk of flooding, areas of upstream catchment land crucial for flood mitigation will be a priority policy.
These local policy opportunities and constraints can be added into the scoring adjustments – your team brings the local policy knowledge, while the Small World Consulting team brings the model development and spatial mapping methodology expertise.
This map shows areas of Lancaster district with additional opportunities and constraints for woodland planting. Some areas are identified for riparian woodland planting to help mitigate flood risk (light green), while others are identified as habitat areas to connect existing ancient woodland (dark green) – both of these add opportunities for woodland planting. The red areas have a high abundance of wading birds, and so add extra constraints for new woodlands.
How do we calculate carbon sequestration estimates from tree planting targets?
We combine tree growth models from the Woodland Carbon Code with soil carbon sequestration values to estimate the overall carbon sink values for new woodland over time.
We currently don’t factor in the vulnerability of tree species to the projected effects of climate change.
The carbon sequestration flux from new woodland planting accelerates in the first couple of decades before starting to slow as trees mature. This results in delayed combined carbon uptake from year-on-year planting in the given landscape in the initial years, followed by acceleration and eventual slowdown as the target tree cover expansion is met.
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These graphs show that consistent levels of new tree planting (left) result in accelerating and then slowing of carbon uptake over a few decades (right).
Regenerative agriculture opportunity mapping
Our latest opportunity mapping for regenerative agriculture is being developed and will be available to clients soon, again as a stand-alone mapping product or as part of a subscription to our Landscape Carbon Tracker.
Peatland restoration opportunity mapping
Our peatland opportunity mapping uses the latest dataset from Natural England, the England Peat Map, published in May 2025, in conjunction with the UK GHG Inventory peat data by the UK CEH. Again, it will be available as a stand-alone product or a part of a subscription to our Landscape Carbon Tracker.
