Spatial Prioritisation as a possible route to multifunctional landscapes
By Julia Daly
In our latest blog post, Julia Daly from our Spatial Prioritisation Team tells us about a recent event held to raise awareness of our Spatial Prioritisation work.
In late November 2024 JNCC hosted stakeholders at an event to raise awareness of Spatial Prioritisation – one of our key land use projects.
Spatial Prioritisation is a concept aimed at simplifying decision making for land managers. Spatial Prioritisation looks at how suitable actions are for a piece of land and how much an action can help deliver environmental priorities. The process involves assessing trade-offs and highlighting opportunities where multiple benefits can be realised. By doing this, Spatial Prioritisation can provide information to make more progress towards our national environmental targets. This will enable land managers to identify the right thing, in the right place, at the right scale to aid in decision making.
The event, entitled 'Spatial Prioritisation – A possible route to multifunctional landscapes', was the first of its kind for the project and created a space for open discussions and dialogue on land use with a diverse range of stakeholders from across government, academia, the private and public sector. There were some excellent discussions held on the need for multifunctional landscapes and the use of data in targeting and prioritising environmental interventions.
Last month’s event was one of several events that JNCC's Spatial Prioritisation Team participated in this year. In September, members of our team presented a poster at the annual Government Geography Profession Conference hosted at Ordnance Survey Headquarters in Southampton. The conference was a good opportunity to showcase our work to a wider audience across government and see some of the many exciting developments being made by other public sector bodies in geospatial analysis.
In April, our team attended the Land Use Summit, a collaborative event by the Zoological Society of London and the British Ecological Society. We presented two posters on Spatial Prioritisation – one providing an overview of the approach and one on how the approach can be applied. The summit focused on land use prioritisation and brought together various organisations and stakeholders interested in, or working in, land use, to encourage join-up and collaboration across multiple industries to ensure the land we have meets our needs.
Spatial Prioritisation is an approach that is still in development and we are ensuring that we engage and collaborate with a range of organisations and individuals. We are keen to understand different views of land use, to include and represent different priorities in our work, and learn how the approach can be improved to make it more useful. For those who would like to see regular updates, and hear about upcoming engagements, please sign up to our mailing list. More information about Spatial Prioritisation and our work on Land Use is available on our webpages. We will be sharing more information on our webpages as this work evolves.