A tool for guiding landowners on how to improve biodiversity on their property has attracted significant interest from potential customers, beyond those involved in the UK biodiversity net gain scheme, an executive has said.
The UK-headquartered Life to Land initiative, set to launch this month, aims to help users understand how to better manage habitats on their property with accessible guidance.
“I have a sizable waiting list of clients, which includes farmers, smallholders, gardeners, ecologists, and nature reserve managers. The demand and broad appeal of the service has exceeded expectations,” said founder Chris D’Agorne.
At entry level, for £15 a month, Life to Land aims to enable users to identify and manage habitats, without inputting location-based data.
Customers can tailor advice on habitats to their land, accompanied by automated seasonal reports.
The platform includes articles on the management of specific habitats like dense scrub, and on land types like woodland, D’Agorne told Carbon Pulse.
“The advice builds from simple to complex, explaining how nature recovery works and how to implement it on your land,” he said.
Clients can also engage with other landowners through forums on Life to Land portal, access funding sources for nature recovery projects, and track biodiversity uplift.
For £350, users can access reports on habitats on their land by entering ecological survey data.
The system is structured around non-profit UKHab’s classification structure of habitats, which underpins the UK government’s biodiversity net gain (BNG) policy.
“While I understand that there are many landowners seeking to work with BNG, and Life to Land should help them understand how to maximise biodiversity on their property, there are many others who sit outside the system,” D’Agorne said.
“They may be restoring nature for the sake of their legacy, or be working on a personal project which isn’t suitable for BNG.” Under the BNG rules, development projects in England need to achieve a net biodiversity improvement of at least 10% from Monday.
The portal was written for UK ecosystems but would also be relevant for clients in northwestern European countries, with D’Agorne having already engaged with potential customers from France, Germany, and the Netherlands.
Users can measure biodiversity improvements using the rough metric of counting visible species of plants and animals themselves, guided by Life to Land.
The biggest obstacle in developing the portal was building an easy-to-use site from an abundance of nature information, D’Agorne said.
A major challenge was the “breadth of the subject matter – I wanted to cover every major British habitat, 18 in all, and that required an awful lot of research”.
“I’ve learned so much through this work, and found so many instances where my assumptions about land management, and the industry dogma, were simply incorrect. It’s been a really fascinating process.”
The launch comes at a time when numerous nature-related technologies are launching to support companies seeking to improve their engagement with biodiversity, galvanised by upcoming regulation.
By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com
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