Essex Biodiversity Project

The Association of Local Government Ecologists (ALGE) have launched a new on-line toolkit of advice about biodiversity.

The toolkit aims to help the planning community contribute to the conservation, enhancement and sustainable use of biodiversity and geodiversity.
The toolkit is still under development, but the pilot is intended to help users appreciate its potential and to understand the basic structure from the content already prepared - and to get a feel for how useful it will be in their day-to-day work. It has been designed to provide a one-stop interactive shop for:
• finding relevant legislation, policy, guidance and good practice
• highlighting potential development impacts
• providing access to information on how to manage such impacts in a way that benefits biodiversity and geodiversity conservation.
The toolkit has two main parts:
• A traditional web site where users will be able to find information relevant for each of the four countries in the United Kingdom.
• An Interactive Landscape – this provides animated scenarios to describe various aspects of biodiversity and geodivesity conservation within different types of development.
The Interactive Landscape also shows visually most of the habitats in the UK Biodiversity Action Plan and a wide range of geodiversity features.
And the pilot includes one of the most innovative approaches found in the Toolkit; this includes an animated farmstead that shows what issues should be considered for ‘Barn Conversions’ and how biodiversity conservation can be built into such a scenario.
The pilot will run from August 9 until the first week of September and includes a questionnaire which should take about ten minutes to complete. It also includes some tasks to help discover how user-friendly the toolkit is to navigate around. ALGE are seeking feedback on this and other aspects of the toolkit.

Access the toolkit pilot here.
www.biodiversityplanningtoolkit.com