Managed Woodland Status in England as of March 2016

Forestry Commission England's Headline Performance Indicator dataset measures the percentage of woodland under active management. The data is derived from administrative sources like grant schemes and felling licenses, integrated into a 25-meter resolution raster file. It provides a snapshot of management status for English woodland as of 31 March 2016.

Use Cases

• Calculate the percentage of actively managed woodland in England based on the defined administrative criteria.
• Create a geospatial map of managed vs. unmanaged woodland areas for regional analysis.
• Assess the impact of specific grant schemes (e.g., EWGS, Countryside Stewardship) on woodland management status.
• Establish a baseline for tracking changes in woodland management over time against the 2016 snapshot.

Strengths

• Data is derived from multiple official administrative sources, including ten defined grant and license schemes.
• Provides a georeferenced raster file with a defined 25-meter cell size for spatial analysis.
• Management status is clearly defined with binary cell values (0 for unmanaged, 1 for managed).

Limitations

• The definition of 'actively managed' is administrative and excludes some management types, as noted in the description.
• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is unknown; the data is a single snapshot from March 2016.

Provenance

Source

Forestry Commission England, via the Government Digital Service and eu_open_data.

Collection Method

Integration of administrative data from grant schemes, felling licenses, and public estate records.

Time Range

Snapshot as of 31 March 2016, with source data from the preceding 15 years.

Freshness

Snapshot as of 31 March 2016; update frequency is unknown.

Geography

England, United Kingdom.