Today marks the official arrival of mandatory Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) for major developments in England. Whilst it’s an exciting step for nature conservation, navigating the new regulations and complex calculations can feel daunting, especially if you’re still using pen and paper, or sub-optimal digital processes. This is where we can help.
Coreo’s UKHab Survey App and new UKHab Data Portal site are designed specifically to help consultancies overcome the challenges of BNG reporting requirements. The UKHab Survey App provides a suite of new functionalities based on user feedback and industry best practice. Added to this, the brand new UKHab Portal tool provides a one-stop shop for the results you need once your survey is complete.
The UKHab Survey App
Built and maintained by the lead author of the UKHab Classification and a co-director of UKHab.org, the UKHab Survey App is designed to streamline your surveys and provide you with the data you need for your BNG assessments and calculations. Leave all of your guidance notes and paper forms at home. With the app, you can:
- Complete essential survey prep, such as pre-survey work.
- Survey in the field, completely offline where required.
- Add habitat and secondary codes, all of which have detailed guidance notes.
- Do your habitat condition assessment in situ, as a part of each record.
- Do quadrat analyses and add full species lists.
The app streamlines all of your data entry work, showing you only the questions and codes that are relevant based on previous responses. And Coreo helps you to avoid gaps and overlaps at the data input stage. If fact, it does most of the work for you, short of identifying the habitat for you (maybe one day!).
The UKHab Data Portal
Our new UKHab Data Portal has been designed as your companion site for everything related to your UKHab surveys and BNG work. With the portal, you can:
- Perform any final edits on habitat geometries collected in the field, e.g. easily remove gaps and overlaps.
- Output survey data in numerous formats, containing all the key information you need for BNG reports.
- Create easy to use outputs of a feature’s condition assessment – ideal for adding to reports.
- Auto-generate maps of your site with the standard symbology and key applied.
- Automatically populate the Metric Calculation Tool with your survey data (supports both v4 and the Statutory Metric).
The UKHab Survey App is available as an add-on to your Coreo licence. And the UKHab Data Portal is available at no cost to all Coreo subscribers with a Pro-tier subscription. Visit our UKHab page to learn more. And if you’d like to arrange a demo for your team, please get in touch: