Sustainable Land Use - Healing our Planet
Where can we have the biggest positive impact on the environment?
The Department for Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA) in Northern Ireland is proactively encouraging farmers to adopt more environmentally-beneficial agricultural practices. It uses geospatial data to help it select the most advantageous land management options on a field-by-field basis, as well as ensuring funding is directed to the locations where it can have the greatest positive impact on the environment.
Through its Environmental Farming Scheme (EFS), DAERA allocates funding and provides support to help farmers adopt more environmentally-beneficial agricultural practices in Northern Ireland. Wide ranging in its goals, the initiative aims to restore biodiversity, improve water quality, reduce soil erosion, foster carbon conservation and reduce greenhouse gas and ammonia emissions from agriculture.
To help it implement the EFS, DAERA analyses a large amount of geospatial information using the DAERA Information Hub, a geographic information system (GIS) solution built on the Esri ArcGIS Enterprise platform. This critical decision support tool provides DAERA with the evidence it needs to formulate the most appropriate management plans, for each individual field, taking into account a wide range of environmental factors. Planners use interactive maps to explore data on everything from habitats and water courses to land use in neighbouring fields, and can then recommend options such as creating buffers along riverbanks, known as riparian buffers, to keep livestock and nutrients out of rivers.
The Information Hub also helps DAERA to target fields where improved land management would be particularly beneficial for the environment. DAERA can then approach specific farmers to encourage them to join the EFS. In one coastal region, DAERA was able to pinpoint 120 fields in a Special Area of Conservation (SAC) that had been designated as a priority for improved environmental management by the Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA). DAERA then contacted the relevant farmers and now 118 of these fields are being managed more sustainably to support the recovery of this particularly important landscape.
“Over 500 hectares of agricultural land in a coastal Special Area of Conservation are now under favourable management as a direct result of using GIS to identify specific fields where interventions could have the most positive impact on the environment.”
Stephen Trew, Senior Countryside Management Inspector, DAERA
To read more inspiring stories of how different organisations and government are using GIS to challenge climate change and make a difference, click here.
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