Mapping River and Lake Restoration Priorities
Organisation: Natural England and FBA
Location: National
Type: Apps & Tools
Link: Visit Website
CaBA partnerships can highlight the best opportunities and most important locations to restore natural ecosystem function to rivers and lakes in their catchment via the FBA Priority Habitats website. This includes streams and small lakes, which are not normally given attention under the WFD, as well as larger water bodies.
These highlighted sites will be added to national maps of river and lake restoration priorities for addressing biodiversity objectives. Having sites identified on these maps will improve the likelihood of support through the Nature Recovery Network Initiative and Water Framework Directive mechanisms. These maps should also be submitted as part of catchment Plans, storymaps or webpages as part of the third cycle of WFD river basin management planning (RBMP3).
Priority Habitats Website
The FBA Priority Habitats website provides information on priority river and lake habitats in England, how you can get involved in their protection and restoration, and in particular how you can provide information on sites to help prioritise conservation action. Catchment Partnerships can add observations and priorities, relating to any part of the river, stream and lake habitat network, through the citizen data portal in order to both help refine the official priority habitat maps for rivers and lakes and help build new maps of restoration priorities.
Natural England have also produced a briefing note on this work which you can download below.
Support Webinar
A webinar held on 26th January 2021 explained what restoration priorities are, why people should record them and how that information will be used. It also included a practical demonstration of how to add restoration priorities to the Priority Habitats Portal including how to sign up to Cartographer (the system being used), how to request and manage a work space, how to add the location of restoration priorities and what the outputs look like.
Header Image: Tatton Mere (c) Natural England