The E-Planner tool contains three tabs:

To get started, make sure you are on the Select tab of the tool. You first need to select the area in which you are interested. This could be a single farm, a few fields or several neighbouring farms.

You can define a rectangular area of interest by clicking this control and drawing a box on the map.

If you have a Single Business Identifier (SBI) from the Rural Payments Agency, click this button to enter it. This will fetch your registered field boundaries and use them as the area of interest.

Or you can upload a GIS file (shapefile) of your area of interest using this control.

Optionally, you can also centre the map on your current location by clicking this button.

If you want to remove an area of interest from the map, use this control.

When you have defined an area of interest, click on the magic wand button to load the suitability maps.

This will move you to the Opportunities tab.

Panels will fill (after a few seconds) with maps, indicating relative suitability for the five different environmental opportunities. The table at the bottom of this user guide lists the five opportunities, the factors used to calculate suitability, and a variety of example management actions for implementing them in different farming systems. The maps will zoom and pan together, so you can explore the relative suitability of different areas easily.

You can indicate which opportunity maps you want to display (up to a maximum of four at any one time) by expanding the Maps to display item on the main menu and ticking the maps you want to see. You can also rearrange the position the maps appear by dragging the items up/down in this list.

You can also use the menu on the left to choose between OpenStreetMap and an aerial photo backdrop (Basemap options), and alter the transparency of the maps with the sliders (Layer transparency). For both of these the maps will respond instantly. You can also change the colour scheme from white-green to blue-red (Style for opportunity maps) but you’ll need to regenerate the maps with the magic wand button to see the new colours.

Note that the maps show the contrast in suitability within the area you selected. The least suitable area on your farm might still be better than average compared of the rest of GB! The traffic lights show you how the area you’ve selected compares to the national priority for each environmental outcome.

Red – lower priority than average (bottom 50%)
Amber – higher priority than average (top 50%)
Green – high priority (top 25%)

The final tab is the Inventory tab.

Clicking this will load (after a few seconds) maps of the habitats currently present in your area of interest. You can select maps of Land Cover and Hedgerows.

Land Cover is calculated from the most recent UKCEH Land Cover Map. The map legend gives a breakdown of the area in hectares of each broad habitat present. These maps are at 10-metre resolution and so may not show all habitats present (especially narrow linear features like field margins) but are intended be used alongside the opportunity maps to help select which habitats might form targets for improvement or expansion. Switching between the Inventory and Opportunities screens can also help show why certain areas are masked out of the opportunity maps (e.g. presence of existing habitats) or why they are mapped with particularly high suitability (e.g. connecting existing habitat patches).

Hedgerows are calculated from the newly released UKCEH Land Cover plus Hedgerows dataset. The map legend gives breakdown of the length in metres of each hedgerow height class. The hedgerow data may not match the exact location of hedgerows on your farm, but is intended be used alongside the opportunity maps to explore which areas within the selected landscape have high or low hedgerow cover.

You can find out more about Land Cover Map and Land Cover plus Hedgerows data by following these links:

• UKCEH Land Cover Maps | UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
• UKCEH Land Cover Plus: Hedgerows 2016-2021 (England) | UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology

Environmental opportunities, factors driving the suitability maps, and example management options for different farming systems