The Forestry Commission and Natural England have revised the Standing Advice on Ancient Woodland, Ancient Trees and Veteran Trees.

Standing advice is a 'material planning consideration' and, as a result, should be taken into account whenever planning application decisions are made. The standing advice covers parkland and wood pasture sites as well as more densely wooded areas, and individual veteran trees. Parkland and wood pasture, and smaller ancient woodland sites (below 2 hectares) are not always on the Ancient Woodland inventory, but are often designated as Local Wildlife Sites.

The updated standing advice can be found on the Gov.UK website here.

We hold datasets on Ancient Woodlands, veteran trees, historic orchards and Local Wildlife sites for Essex. For more details of these and other datasets we hold, please click here.