The Environment Agency is responsible for licensing a range of activities relating to rivers, such as abstractions, discharges, and waste management applications. These decisions are based on a difficult balance between economic pressures (for example ensuring that sufficient water is available to meet the demand) as well as maintaining the overall quality and biodiversity of the water.
Every year the Environment Agency's National Permitting Service receives over 20,000 permit applications and clearly there is considerable pressure to make the process as efficient as possible, and to assist with this the Environment Agency has invested in a system known as Easimap (Figure 1). This essentially brings together a range of data sources and allows permit applications to be automatically screened to identify those that require the most attention. Depending on the activity and the feature the system searches a particular proximity to the proposed activity and summarises the features that could be affected by the activity, allowing expert staff to come to a judgement on whether the activity should go ahead.
Figure 1: Easimap
The system includes access to details of protected sites, local wildlife sites, and, critically, information relating to the biodiversity of rivers. While the Environment Agency has a certain amount of its own data relating to the biodiversity of the rivers, it recognises that there is a huge amount of additional sources (both local and national) now available through the National Biodiversity Network and the EA is now attempting to gain access to as many of these as possible to ensure that the biodiversity component is taken into consideration to the maximum possible extent.
Initially the Environment Agency intends to periodically download a copy of the relevant data for inclusion within its system but the intention is, in a later iteration, to make use of the NBN Gateway web services.
The species currently being used to screen the applications are:
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