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If your Catchment Partnership is responding to the Challenges & Choices Consultation, you may want to include mention of current work on the priority habitat mechanism that Catchment Partnerships are being invited to feed in to.
Highlighting the importance of priority freshwater and wetland habitat objectives and targets in your consultation response will help to ensure that actions to support the recovery of biodiversity are given due weighting within the forthcoming River Basin Management Plans.
Catchment Partnerships are able to add their own observations and priorities, relating to any part of the river, stream and lake habitat network, to an FBA website and data portal dedicated to priority habitats, in order to both help refine the official priority habitat maps for rivers and lakes and help build new maps of restoration priorities. Using these maps in catchment planning will ensure that projects in your catchment are supported by the priority habitat driver, which can provide important additional impetus for restoring natural ecosystem function on top of WFD ecological status objectives.
The attached note from Natural England further explains this mapping work, and the link with River Basin Planning.
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