Woodland Carbon Code Projects: Spatial Extent and Status in the UK

Woodland Carbon Code projects are registered and validated UK woodland creation initiatives for carbon accounting, managed by the Forestry Commission. The dataset provides the spatial extent of projects along with their current status, species type, and country, and is updated quarterly. Statistics are produced on the last day of March, June, September, and December.

Use Cases

• Mapping carbon sequestration project locations based on the spatial extent data.
• Analyzing project status trends (e.g., validated, verified) over time.
• Studying the distribution of tree species used in carbon offset projects.
• Assessing the relationship between grant-aided and non-grant-aided woodland creation areas.

Strengths

• Projects are validated at the outset and verified at regular intervals, as described.
• Data is updated quarterly alongside official statistics.
• Includes spatial, status, species, and country information for each project.

Limitations

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

Provenance

Source

Forestry Commission, via the UK Woodland Carbon Registry managed by Markit.

Collection Method

Projects register publicly on the UK Woodland Carbon Registry.

Time Range

Quarterly updates; specific temporal coverage of projects is not stated.

Freshness

Updated quarterly; last metadata update was 2026-04-09.

Geography

United Kingdom.