Tristan O’Leary, Communications Lead for environmental mapping company Land App, talks about the EWCO Checker Tool, their new digital mapping tool to help boost woodland creation.
Supporting landowners and managers to access funding for sustainable practices is central to Land App’s mission, and our new England Woodland Creation Offer (EWCO) Checker Tool is no exception.
This new digital mapping tool, created in partnership with the Forestry Commission, allows landowners and managers to easily plan where they might integrate trees on their land. It highlights where they could benefit from additional stackable payments from the Forestry Commission’s flagship grant, the England Woodland Creation Offer (EWCO), whilst also benefiting the wider environment.
Accessed through a free digital map, the new EWCO Checker Tool visually shows landowners and managers, down to individual field parcel level, what EWCO additional contribution payments they might receive, if the area is eligible for tree planting. Additional contributions are extra payments of up to £8,000 per hectare for new woodlands that help mitigate climate change, deliver nature recovery benefits, or provide wider environmental and social benefits.
The tool also includes 100-year estimates for how much carbon they could capture through a proposed woodland creation site, using figures and methods from the Woodland Carbon Code. The WCC is a government-backed scheme that enables carbon sequestered by new woodland creation projects to be sold in the voluntary carbon market, adding an extra income stream for landowners.
One of the greatest challenges of agricultural transition is giving people on the ground the tools to easily understand their options for the future – in both an environmental and a business context. At Land App, we designed the EWCO Checker Tool with landowners, managers and agents in mind. We wanted to make the EWCO pre-application and planning process as intuitive and accessible as possible.
We work closely with agents such as Nicholsons, a family business offering environmental and ecological consultancy, who have been trialling the new tool.
They told us:
Having the ability to assess whole land holdings for woodland creation potential and generate a report and a map of all available areas, is so incredibly useful. The tool automatically buffers out unavailable or sensitive areas, such as Scheduled Monuments, as well as buffering areas around existing woodland that are suitable for Natural Colonisation.
The EWCO Checker Tool is an excellent way to see what EWCO additional contributions are available and therefore, what grant funding it could achieve. It speeds up what was a slow, manual process. This allows us to help potential applicants much more quickly and more accurately.
Once Land App users have generated a woodland creation report and assessed any woodland creation potential, they can accurately draw plans using their Land Registry ownership boundary lines to guide them. Using the Woodland Creation template, they can plot areas as certain habitat types, as well as include capital items available through EWCO, such as vehicle gates and fencing.
The EWCO Checker tool is designed for everyone, whether you’re an individual farmer, a public body, or a larger business supporting clients through their woodland creation journey. It flags where you might have the most straightforward and economically beneficial route to a successful woodland creation application.
The EWCO Checker Tool summary is of course subject to meeting the eligibility requirements as detailed in the EWCO Grant Manual and all EWCO applications will be reviewed by the Forestry Commission. However, the tool empowers people to navigate some of these requirements and helps visualise tree planting plans with greater ease, before seeking further advice or speaking to their local Forestry Commission Woodland Officer or following up with the Woodland Carbon Code.
Learn more about the EWCO Checker Tool, or if you have any questions for the Land App team, please get in touch at support@thelandapp.com.
The EWCO Checker Tool has been built in partnership with the Forestry Commission and the Woodland Carbon Code and is now available, for free in the Land App. Currently, the tool is only applicable for land in England that is registered with a Single Business Identifier (SBI) number. It provides an estimated value of what a landowner or manager might receive and is in no way a binding or guaranteed summary of payment.
2 comments
Comment by Arnold Seers posted on
Okay this does not make sense so to do anything you have to speak to the forestry commission, for what ? Why can’t the land owners just type up a plan a table and say what they planted what days what times and what seeds , if it’s going to be this difficult I can quite assure you I will be replacing the woods on my land and then going straight to Scotland and do it up there , I want to plant acres and acres for the countries sake , and if it’s going to be this difficult I would rather take it else where that way people will have to pay more abroad for wooded areas through me
Comment by gemmaaronson posted on
Thank you for your comment, our new EWCO Checker Tool is just one way we support landowners and managers to access funding for sustainable practices, and to ensure the right tree is planted in the right place for the right reason. The checker tool is optional to use, and we welcome feedback on how our customers find it or how it could be improved in the future.
The information we ask for as part of a EWCO application is required for us to consider proposals from a regulatory perspective, something we do as part of the EWCO process, to ensure the proposals meet the requirements of the UK Forestry Standard and the Environmental Impact Assessment Regulations. It is important to note that applications that are in locations less sensitive to woodland creation, which readily demonstrate compliance with UK Forestry Standard and are completed thoroughly can be processed faster because we don’t need to ask you for more information. There are certain steps you can take to ensure your application is correct that we have set out in our blog: https://forestrycommission.blog.gov.uk/2022/05/10/five-tips-to-help-you-apply-for-the-england-woodland-creation-offer/.
Your local Woodland Officer can also assist you with expert advice about managing your woodland, the range of support available and the regulatory processes involved. Details of your local office can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/forestry-commission/about/access-and-opening.