CBDC Habitat Information Submission Form
New and up-to-date habitat data is critical to a range of current initiatives/programmes, including delivery of the Local Nature Recovery Strategy (and associated partner plans and strategies), and delivery/evaluation of biodiversity net gain and natural capital investment programmes. More prosaically, better habitat information is needed across Cumbria to inform all land-based and development decision making: as the most biodiverse county in England, we need to know what habitats we have, where and in what condition. If we don’t know what we have, we don’t know what we need to protect or improve.
The last county-wide survey of Cumbrian habitat was in the 1980s. Habitat information has been gathered since then but has not always been sent to CBDC to build a more up-to-date habitat map for Cumbria. Developing the Local Nature Recovery Strategy (LNRS) in 2024/25 has created a new habitat map for Cumbria through collation of some large habitat datasets that have been shared by land managers and through modelling to help fill some of the gaps but there is still an urgent need for ground-truthed data to verify the modelled data, update existing datasets and fill the remaining ‘white space’ where there are no data.
If you have any digital habitat data and are willing to share your data with CBDC to better understand the county-level picture, please complete the form below and send your information to us. Please ensure that you have the correct permissions from the land owner/data owner to share the data: CBDC can send a data sharing agreement to you and is happy to discuss sharing opportunities if you have any concerns. Please contact datamanager@cbdc.org.uk if you have any questions, are unsure how to share the data/complete the form or if you would like to discuss your data holdings with us before you submit your datasets. We want to make data submission as easy as possible for you.
Data which can work for different purposes (such as monitoring LNRS delivery, informing planning/BNG decisions, assessing biodiversity potential etc.) and can be shared and used in an efficient manner, needs to be collected and stored in a consistent format and/or according to agreed standards. Similarly aligning (where possible) local data collation standards with those of key national data sets (for example the updating/maintaining the Priority Habitat Inventory) will ensure more fluid flow of data from national to local and vice-versa. CBDC have worked with partners to develop a data standards policy for habitat information which can be read HERE. PLEASE READ this document for guidance on the key information to be included in any data submission.
Please complete the form with as much information as you can. If you are unsure of any responses, leave blank or select the response that best reflects your understanding of the data. The form is intended for small data submissions or as a first step in submitting a large dataset: if submitting data for a large number of sites or a large, detailed dataset, please contact datamanager@cbdc.org.uk to discuss the best options for submission after completing as much of this form as possible. We understand that data takes many different forms and it might be simpler to discuss what you have with us first!
We are only able to accept digitised data: this form is not intended as a service for digitising habitat data.
