Local Nature Recovery Strategies and Big Chalk – where are we now?

What are they?

Local Nature Recovery Strategies (LNRS) are spatial plans to identify local priorities and opportunities for nature recovery and there are four parts to each LNRS:

• A description of the area,
• a list of biodiversity priorities and measures,
• a detailed (online) local habitat map and,
• a species priority list.

Together, these should provide a clear, evidence-based picture of the current state of nature and where there are opportunities to improve things in the future. Importantly, they are put together with lots of local consultation and will help decide where money should be spent.

It is now two years since LNRSs were launched, and it has been a long process to get them close to completion. This is not surprising since they are created with input from a wide local audience, need to go through public consultation and, for many, local elections intervened. However, about half are complete and publicly available, and, with Big Chalk overlapping 27 of the 48, now is a good time to look at what we have.

The good news is most are either complete and ‘adopted’ (13) or have gone through the public consultation stage (12) and are on the way to being adopted. This means we have been able to have a look at the priorities and measures from 25 of 27 LNRSs.

We have put together a toolkit to track the priorities and measures for the most important chalk and limestone habitats – grasslands; woodlands; rivers and streams. The toolkit helped us to try and influence LNRSs as they came into public consultation. This does mean priorities and measures in the toolkit are from the consultation documents - for some there are minor changes in the final strategies.

Has Big Chalk influenced LNRSs?

From the beginning we felt it was important to try and influence as many of the LNRSs in the Big Chalk region? as possible to make sure they worked together across the whole of Big Chalk and reflected our priorities. To do this, we recruited Big Chalk LNRS Champions from across our Partnership (thank you to all those who stepped up) and produced a briefing to help them. Once we had details from the first five LNRSs, we updated the briefing and, with help from the Rivers Trust and Plantlife, included some best practice recommendations for grasslands and chalk streams.

So, the question is how successful have we been? In reality it is a bit of a mixed bag, with some like the West of England, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire extensively name checking Big Chalk and including our map. Five others make substantial references to Big Chalk and the guidance, with a further five giving a brief mention.

When it comes to chalk and limestone grasslands, 13 have them as a priority, whilst 21 of the 25 have specific chalk and limestone grassland measures. Pretty good but the number of measures does vary from 1 (Hertfordshire) to 14 (Wiltshire).

Only 18 of the LNRSs have chalk streams. Of these, 14 have chalks streams as a priority and 17 of the 18 have chalk stream measures, the exception being Devon. Again, the number of measures vary with Buckinghamshire (6), Wiltshire (7), Kent (8) and Hampshire (9) having the most.

How coherent are LNRSs?

A feature of LNRSs is most of the Measures are spatially mapped and, with 27 LNRSs across Big Chalk, it is important for the maps to line up with each other to form a network so nature can move around. This is one of the underlying principles of Big Chalk.

So far, we have access to data from 10 of the maps and when we zoom in, it looks like there is excellent alignment:

Maps of four LNRSs (West of England, Wiltshire and Swindon, Oxfordshire and Berkshire) showing how well these ones line up across county boundaries.

• Blue is ‘Areas of Particular Importance for Biodiversity’, for example Sites of Special Scientific Interest.
• Light green are ‘Areas that Could Become Important for Biodiversity’ and will be the focus of LNRSs.
• For reference, the large blue areas are Salisbury Plain, which holds most of England’s chalk grassland

What next?

With a bit of luck, we should have all 27 LNRSs in place in the next six months. Then we can use them as part of a prioritisation tool we are developing to help us prioritise applications to a future version of the Nature Recovery Fund. We beta-tested this with the limited maps we had available for this first round and when we had LNRS data, it provided helpful additional information for making decisions.

We haven’t made use of the species lists for the LNRSs yet. Once they are all available, we should be able to put together a common Big Chalk priority species list across the whole area. Bearing in mind, there will be some species with local distributions, and we won’t forget those. Natural England are planning to pull together the priority species lists of all LNRSs and so there is an opportunity to work together there.

Finally, this is only the start, and the LNRSs will be reviewed three to 10 years in the future (still to be decided). Next time round, we will have a much better idea of how to influence them and, because of the great work Big Chalk is doing, maybe those that didn’t mention us will have to take notice of what we are doing.

Bruce Winney, Nature Recovery Coordinator, National Landscape Association