Putting (National) Trust in data: Transforming land management with GIS

The charity has already protected more than 25,000 hectares – now it’s getting even more ambitious

The National Trust’s GIS tools are helping to drive data-led conservation and manage habitats across the UK.

Managing more than 500 historic sites and almost 900 miles of coastline, the National Trust is well aware of the challenges facing nature in the UK. From a lack of biodiversity to habitat loss, we are one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.

That’s why, in 2015, the National Trust set itself a 10-year target to create or restore 25,000 hectares (around 100 square miles) of wildlife habitats, an area twice the size of Manchester.

“The nature of the National Trust estates is that our land is scattered far and wide across three countries,” says head of data Huw Davies, "so it's quite a difficult thing to get your hand on.

“We needed to get a strategic overview and centralise that data, so we could see what was happening across the piece.”

The organisation built the Habitat Actions Database to support local needs and local teams but also display that all-important national overview. Staff can use it to mark boundaries, envision what can be done with land under management, and follow a workflow of planning for delivery.

This work relies on Geographic Information Systems (GIS), in this case provided through National Trust’s partner Esri.

“It’s a pipeline and lifecycle tool,” said Ian Dawes, National Trust’s GIS product manager. “You can see what’s going in, what stage it’s at and what the targets are, so you have some confidence on whether delivery is going to be met.”

National Trust has been using GIS tooling since before Huw joined in 2011, but it was “originally seen as an estate management function,” with the outputs siloed and used inconsistently. Today, that has all changed.

“As well as developing our technical capability and working with Esri for the software, we’ve also tried to professionalise the GIS function,” he says. “We changed the nature of those roles, so they became less about administrative support and map production and more about providing a professional data management and GIS consultancy; so providing professional consultancy services to the organisation.”

As for how National Trust is using GIS today, “It’s a data capture tool used by our rangers and nature experts at our properties. They can draw boundaries and add attribution in terms of what the habitat is, what life cycle stage it’s at.”

That’s the front end. At the back end, the tool has important analytics and reporting capabilities to make sure National Trust is meeting its targets.

No more pen and paper

The combination of the Habitat Actions app and GIS mobile tooling means people are no longer going out with “pens and bits of paper” to capture data. These days they can report directly from the field, which means capturing data “as part of the job, not an afterthought,” says Ian.

“Once that state is captured into the SaaS environment it’s available everywhere; it can go anywhere you need to it go, because we’ve got a REST endpoint for that information.”

While GIS capabilities aren’t yet active at every property, all of National Trust’s largest sites have the capability. The goal now is to spread it to partners like the RSPB, Woodland Trust and Wildlife Trust.

“We're often working in larger landscape-scale schemes,” says Huw. "One of the things we see with the move to the cloud, and particularly the Esri platform, is that we can come on to the same digital platform [as our partners] to share data and analytics in real-time. It provides that platform, that sort of language for collaboration, that's super helpful for us.”

National Trust is pushing its digital transformation forward using GIS, which is a good thing. The organisation completed – in fact, “comfortably exceeded – its 10-year plan to manage 25,000 hectares for nature this year. Over the next decade, it wants to scale that up to 250,000 hectares across both its own and other properties.

“In the last strategy, decisions were made and GIS was used to record what happened,” says Ian. “This time, we’re hoping to bed it more into the decision-making up front.”