Welcome to E-Planner! E-Planner is a free tool developed by UKCEH to help farmers and other land mangers identify the most suitable places for different environmental management actions via easy to use, interactive maps.
E-Planner uses environmental datasets to build GB-coverage maps of the relative suitability of land for different environmental opportunities. Each opportunity has a range of associated potential management actions, depending on the farming system and local context, but with relative suitability driven by similar factors. The five opportunities currently mapped in E-Planner are:
- Water resource protection (e.g. buffer strips and cover crops)
- Woodland creation (e.g. planting of trees on-farm)
- Seed-rich bird habitat (e.g. wild bird seed margins, overwinter stubbles)
- Flower-rich pollinator habitats (e.g. flower margins and grassland restoration)
- Wet grassland restoration (e.g. restoring wet grassland and floodplain meadows)
Suitability is based on factors such as topography, soils, nearby habitats, landscape features etc. Maps are presented as 5-metre resolution ‘heat maps’ for a chosen area or farm, making it straightforward to compare the most suitable opportunity for a given area or to identify the most suitable location for a particular opportunity.
E-Planner supports and streamlines decision making by presenting complex environmental data in an easy to interpret way. It cannot replace local knowledge and does not suggest an ‘optimum’ solution, so we suggest using the following workflow:
1 | Make an assessment Consider which environmental opportunities you’re interested in. Use agronomic data (e.g. precision yield maps) and your own knowledge to identify less productive or difficult to farm areas. |
2 | Use the tool Compare suitability of different opportunities for each area or find the most suitable areas for each opportunity. Build an initial plan. |
3 | Sense check Use your field visits to check your plan. There may be local factors the maps don’t account for (e.g. infrastructure, disturbance). |
4 | Implement and monitor Use best practice guidance to implement management and monitor its success (see Next Steps) |
1 | Make an assessment Consider which environmental opportunities you’re interested in. Use agronomic data (e.g. precision yield maps) and your own knowledge to identify less productive or difficult to farm areas. |
2 | Use the tool Compare suitability of different opportunities for each area or find the most suitable areas for each opportunity. Build an initial plan. |
3 | Sense check Use your field visits to check your plan. There may be local factors the maps don’t account for (e.g. infrastructure, disturbance). |
4 | Implement and monitor Use best practice guidance to implement management and monitor its success (see Next Steps) |
Farmers are increasingly under pressure to deliver a wide range of environmental goals from their land as well as producing food. However, balancing these competing goals is a big challenge. Although there are many digital tools supporting the planning of fine-scale decisions around food production (e.g. precision agricultural systems), equivalents for supporting the environmental aspects of farm decision-making are limited. We designed E-Planner to fill this gap.
We welcome feedback and suggestions for improvement; see the About UKCEH section for contact details. A scientific paper detailing the science, technology and methods behind E-Planner is also now available.
Now find out how to use E-Planner...