Last updated: April 2024
Author: Rob Lambert
Editor at Arbtech, Rob is a content specialist who manages our ecology and arboriculture services copy to ensure it is accurate, up to date, and insightful for current and future clients.
Everything You Need to Know
A simple, quick and relatively cheap ecological assessment. We do a field study at your site and provide you with a highly concise report including photographs and commentary on any valuable plants, habitats and animals recorded at the time of the visit.
As one of the UK’s foremost ecological consultancies and providers of everything from European protected species surveys to tree protection plans; we’ve got a lot of expertise to leverage to the benefit of your development. However, not all sites require the sledgehammer that is an extended phase 1 habitat survey, by far the most comprehensive level of walkover ecological assessment.
For example, if you already have a planning consent in place and are simply seeking a survey to help you to obtain credits for a code for sustainable homes ecology report, there is no need to go to great lengths to produce details habitat maps using GIS software. What you would need in that scenario is a clean, simple report with a few practical guidelines to keep you and your building contractors on the right side of any protected species legislation. A highly concise report follows our ‘field study’ at your site, and provides photographs and commentary on any valuable plants, habitats and animals recorded at the time of the visit.
This demonstrates that you have undertaken a scientifically rigorous ecological appraisal of your site, and used the results to propose mitigation for any net habitat loss, and better, biodiversity enhancements (which can be simple and cheap: bird boxes, native planting and so on).
The key take home points about ecological walkover surveys are that they are very quick to organise, relatively cheap, and that if you provide one up front with your planning application, or in advance of a sustainability assessment (for Code/BREEAM), it will go a long way toward helping achieve your development ambitions while avoiding unplanned costs and delays, as well as outright refusal from your local planning authority.