Celebrating National Hedgerow Week
It’s National Hedgerow Week 2024!
In the UK, tree, hedgerow, and woodland (THaW) habitats are key havens for biodiversity and support many related ecosystem services.
The UK is entering a period of agricultural policy realignment with respect to natural capital and climate change, meaning that now is a critical time to evaluate the distribution, resilience, and dynamics of THaW habitats.
Members of our NetZeroPlus team have been undertaking research into these habitats as part of our work on accounting for existing UK carbon stocks, to create a starting point for monitoring, reporting and verifying changes to the carbon stock over time. Find out about that process and the resulting toolkit below…
To celebrate the occasion, here is a reminder of our team’s work on Hedgerows, led by David Luscombe, Karen Anderson and Richard Brazier.
The team have created an opensource dataset of hedgerows and trees throughout England and Wales – at a 1m spatial resolution (not for profit CC BY-NC-ND)
The mapping product uses airborne lidar data to deliver Tree Hedgerow and Woodland (THaW) baseline mapping across national extents with an accuracy of between 91 % and 94 % compared to manually digitised features.
Output mapping data allow users to distinguish features based on both the height and areas of the mapped features, allowing the differentiation of scrub, hedgerows, isolated or emergent trees, and continuous woody cover.
It is currently being used to build an inventory of above ground woody carbon and to inform sub-annual change detection tools.
