Wood-pasture and Parkland is a priority habitat under the UK Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP) - it is an extremely important habitat for a wide variety of wildlife, including species of invertebrates and fungi that are also listed as priorities on the Plan. Parklands and wood-pastures are also exceptionally important for their landscape and historical heritage values. Many sites bear statutory designations and protection as Sites of Special Scientific Interest and Registered Landscapes.

Natural England is the Lead Partner for the Habitat Action Plan for Wood-pasture and Parkland. There is an abundance of information on each of the areas of interest but it is largely fragmentary, widely dispersed and uncatalogued. Better integration of this information is needed to inform planning and site management, to determine resource needs and to target effort.

To that end, we are preparing a Web-based Information System to enable ‘single point of entry’ access to as much of that data as possible, either in summary or sometimes in its original form.
Metadata are provided that provide details of data holdings related to WAPIS. Some of these data sources have been recruited and are now available online.
Work on the Information System is being undertaken by Blue-Bag Ltd. Our approach is to develop a data model compatible with the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) and to access the other sources of information via the Joint Nature Conservation Committee’s (JNCC) NBN Gateway.

The end result will be an information system where it will be possible to find out which organisations have interest in any particular site, who holds what data on its wildlife and heritage features, how it has been evaluated and what statutory designations may apply. Additonally it will enable us to identify gaps in our knowledge and help circumvent possible conflicts with the aim of gaining a fully integrated approach to the management of parks and wood-pastures throughout the UK.

To enable the collection of information regarding the managment of locations and their features of relevance to the wood-pasture and parklandhabitat action plan, a software 'add-in' for Recorder 2002 has been developed. This is freely available for all users of Recorder 2002. Here more about the WAPIS add-in for Recorder 2002? Click here.

The Information Source is a new and challenging development of methods of data access and data management within and between conservation bodies and the ‘outside world’. Work on this phase of the project is funded by Natural England