SFGS Forest Plans: Scottish Forestry Grant Scheme Contracts and Approvals

SFGS Forest Plans contain records of approved 20-year management plans for Scottish woodlands, which provided felling and restocking approval for 10-year contract periods. The dataset includes attributes such as plan number, name, status, owner type, grid reference, local authority, contract dates, and total area. It was managed by the Forestry Commission (now Scottish Forestry) and closed to new applications in December 2006.

Use Cases

• Analyzing the spatial distribution of forestry grants based on the National Grid Reference and Local Authority fields.
• Tracking the lifecycle of forest management contracts based on status, contract start, and contract end dates.
• Studying landowner participation patterns based on property type and owner type attributes.
• Assessing the scale of approved forestry work based on the total area in hectares.

Strengths

• Includes explicit spatial reference via National Grid Reference for geospatial analysis.
• Contains multiple administrative and temporal attributes, such as Local Authority, Conservancy, and contract start/end dates.
• Dataset scope is clearly defined by the closure of the SFGS scheme to new applications in December 2006.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

Government Digital Service, via the eu_open_data platform.

Collection Method

Administrative records from the Scottish Forestry Grant Scheme (SFGS).

Time Range

Covers plans from the Woodland Grant Scheme (1999-2003) and Scottish Forestry Grant Scheme (2003-2006) periods.

Freshness

Dataset is historical, covering plans approved up to 2006; last updated date is unknown.

Geography

Scotland, United Kingdom.