Chapter 8 Conclusion

Through this work we have brought together the most comprehensive national compilation of government-funded woodland creation projects in the country. By unifying diverse spatial submissions and annual returns into a single, coherent evidence base, and applying a set of scientific indicators to them, we can now provide new insights into where and how woodland creation is being delivered, and how it generates outcomes for nature recovery, net zero targets, and other services.

This work helps to track progress of NCF by providing a trajectory of benefits to 2050 and beyond. This helps provide a picture of outcomes that may take years or decades to fully materialise, and monitoring programmes can use the estimates as a measure of maximum potential benefits to track success against. The evidence base compiled through this project provides a strong foundation for identifying future opportunities, supporting delivery of statutory woodland creation and nature recovery targets.

8.1 Legacy

The NCF Scientific Indicators will inform the wider NCF programme evaluation, including a value for money analysis. The indicators and modelling approaches provide a transferable and scalable framework for assessing environmental benefits in future nature-based initiatives. By integrating spatially explicit data and standardised evaluation metrics, this approach enhances the ability to track long-term ecosystem changes and measure progress toward national conservation and climate targets. As such, we hope that they will find applications in the planning and evaluation of new project pipelines for nature recovery.

Future programmes can build on this methodology to improve decision-making, optimise site selection and refine land management strategies to maximise carbon sequestration, biodiversity gains and other ecosystem services. All the project code and data will be passed on to Defra alongside training materials, to facilitate the use and adaptation of the methods for new purposes.

There are already projects within Defra that are planning on using our benefit estimates for NCF to:

  • Inform the NCF programme evaluation, including the spending review
  • Model projected benefits for the business case of the NCF successor programme
  • Support a research project on biodiversity benefits from different woodland types

This project generated most indicator results down to site level, and we hope that they will be re-analysed to fuel more research and exploration into how benefits from planting programmes are delivered, spatially and thematically. The supporting data generated for the project, such as the planting masterfile and the habitat baseline (Appendix A), can also help support further analysis, within the Trees team and beyond. These are examples of questions that the data could help answer:

  • What benefits does NCF deliver in rural vs urban locations?
  • How are the NCF sites providing accessible nature to their local communities?
  • Are there more opportunities for planting in areas where existing sites are especially effective in delivering outcomes?

8.2 Recommendations

Given that the key challenge for this project was to reconcile planting data submitted by delivery partners with centrally held information (such as FC Official Statistics), we recommend that Forestry Commission and Defra work more closely with delivery partners so that spatial data reconciles to the official statistics submissions. Trees outside woodland seem especially inconsistent in their digitising and reporting, and partners feel they “slip through the net” and are not accounted for properly.

A project on data standards is currently being carried out within Defra, and observations from this project have fed into it. We would advise looking up to planting partners who have already developed digitising standards (e.g. England’s Community Forests) and encourage uptake of the key principles from all partners. This could be done through information sessions and technical guides.

Using consistent, unique identifiers

Our most important recommendation would be to ensure that all sites are given unique identifiers that follow a predictable pattern recognisable within the organisation. For instance, some Community Forests use alpha-numeric codes made of 3 letters for the local authority and 3 digits for the site number, e.g. CHE_074. This is robust and much less prone to errors and typos than informal codes or free text. We had several hundreds of mismatches which we had to reconcile manually, e.g. matching a “Simpson Road Gardens” polygon to a “Simpson Rd” spreadsheet entry.

Not all delivery partners have dedicated GIS officers who have the expertise required to validate spatial data against collated statistics. In large organisations where such support exists, we recommend that one person is in charge of reviewing submissions and statistics from all woodland creation officers to ensure that the return form going out to Forestry Commission is internally reconciled. Where the support is not available, it could perhaps be sourced from another delivery partner (short contract), or the validation could be conducted on the receiving end (FC).

Another issue we had was around licencing restrictions on some of the spatial data. Current agreements sometimes restrict the use and sharing of the data, which creates a risk that some benefits may not be recognised. In the end, these issues were resolved with special licencing agreements, but caused severe delays. To future-proof the use of spatial data in similar evaluations, we would recommend that data sharing agreements with landowners have special provisions facilitating the sharing of spatial information (with appropriate restrictions around personally identifiable information such as address, business name or landowner name, etc, but not on the boundaries themselves).