New Nature Recovery Tool for the Brecon Beacons Local Nature Partnership Rebecca Price, Ecologist, Brecon Beacons National Park Authority The Brecon Beacons Local Nature Partnership is pleased to launch its new Web Mapping Portal – “The Brecon Beacons Nature Recovery Tool”. The tool which has been developed over the last year is thanks to the collective hard work of WWBIC and SEWBReC. The mapping portal provides Local Nature Partners access to a suite of ecological GIS-layers. Together, these maps are intended to be one part of the picture in helping inform decisions on where to focus efforts for nature recovery networks. A key part of the project was to attempt to present, in a spatial format, a baseline for ecosystem resilience (and its key attributes) and importantly to do this at a local level. Building on work done previously by SEWBReC, WWBIC, and others, the project created ecosystem resilience as well as habitat network/connectivity opportunities GIS-layers for the National Park and brings them together with existing data into the web mapping portal. A biodiversity hotspots layer was also created. The portal which allows users to interact and overlay data on basemaps and view at a wide range of scales, makes it a tool for helping identify opportunities
and support project planning from small local projects to strategic plans. Since the introduction of the Environment (Wales) Act 2016, public bodies including National Park Authorities have sought to meet their duty under Section 6, “to maintain and enhance biodiversity and promote the resilience of ecosystems.” The Local Nature Recovery Action Plan (NRAP) is a key mechanism for guiding practical actions to help achieve this through the LNP. Yet working out what ecosystem resilience really “looks like” and how to assess it in the context of the National Park is no easy challenge.
Figure 1: Overall Ecosystem Resilience Map (Brecon Beacons National Park)
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