Our Landscape Planning team in Bristol is excited to be starting the third year of national surveys to assess the impacts of agri-environment schemes on landscape character and quality.

This Natural England/Defra project will provide a large body of evidence to enable the effective future targeting of agri-environment schemes to further improve their contribution to the management, conservation and enhancement of England’s varied landscapes.

This year we will also be collecting evidence to feed into the long-running New Agricultural Landscapes (NALs) programme. Established by the then Countryside Commission in 1972 in response to concerns about the impact agricultural intensification may have on the landscape, it is thought to be one of the longest running landscape monitoring projects in Europe. Case study NAL landscapes are revisited every 11 years with methods such as fixed point photography analysis tracking long-term landscape changes. We are thrilled to be contributing to the 44 year of this hugely important and ground-breaking project.