Nature in Landscapes
The AONB is an ecologically diverse area with internationally important chalk grassland and rivers supporting rare wildlife. The AONB Partnership aims in its management plan to conserve and enhance the landscape character, habitats, species and tranquility of the AONB.
Habitats
Biodiveristy is the variety of life and forms an intinsic link with natural beatury. It encompasses the entirety of habitats and wildlife in all its forms.
Specific to this AONB there are Local Biodiversity Action Plans, and these are the main mechanisms for the delivery of targets for species and habitat enhancement. These key habitats suupport key species such as Skylark, Corn Bunting, Stone Curlew, Grey Partridge, Brown Hare and Water Vole.
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Wildlife designations
The AONB supports international nature conservation designations including five Special Areas of Conservation, three National Nature reserves and 57 Sites of Special Scientific Interest..
Within the AONB there are four particularly characteristic and valuable habitat types supporting a range of rare and vunerable species. These are Chalk Grassland, Arable Farmland and Pasture, Rivers and their Associated Habitats and Woodland.
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Ancient Woodland Priority Area
In total there are 7201.5 ha of ancient woodland within the AONB. Larger woodlands of note include Cranbonre Chase of which 451 ha is SSSI, Grovely Wood to the West of Salisbury and Great Ridge Wood to the North.
The AONB has been identified as an Ancient Woodland Priority Area by the Forestry Commission (from 2009 onwards).
Ancient woodlands and trees represent a living cultural heritage, a natural equivalent to our great churches and castles. They are also our richest wildlife habitat and are highly valued by people as places of tranquility and inspiration.
The Forestry Commission are seeking to protect and enhance the ancient and native woodlands of the South West and increase the area of native woodland. This is acheived by offering grants under the English Woodland Grant Scheme and by working in partnership with organisation such as this AONB.
For more details see the Forestry Commission Website.
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Woodland - Mapping woodland and providing evidence and advice
In 2008 the AONB embarked upon a new project to draw together the various resources that provided the evidence for our work on woodland and trees, entitled "The Trees and Woodlands of the Cranborne Chase and West Wiltshire Downs: a landscape view". For copies contact the office.
This document is aimed primarily at land owners and managers, advisers and consultants, but also those people who want to better understand how we came to came to our landscape view. It is hoped that this document will help by providing an evidence base that justifies landscape scale working. The forester or landowner will then be able to make better decisions about their own sites, applying to this base layer their detailed site knowledge from the site history, their personal experience, their training and their own objectives.
As part of this project a new dataset was created which identifies all the woodland in the AONB, regardless of size. It uses existing data available to the AONB in a number of new ways. All the different kinds of woodland habitat that are found in the AONB have been recorded. This includes features such as wooded scrub on the sides of chalk escarpments, small copses in the corners of fields and small ornamental plantations within the setting of larger designed landscapes, all of which tended to be excluded from the previous datasets available to the AONB.
The initial pilot and feasibility study is available to downland below.
The new methodology used to map, identify and describe the woodland is also available to download below.
High resolution versions of these documents are available from the AONB Office.
Download: A new desk based method of digitising, characterising, and recording woodland at a landscape scale (PDF, 996kB)
Download: Trees and Woodland Advice Project Feasibility Study (PDF, 930kB)
Please Note: Some of the above documents may require Adobe Acrobat Reader to view them, you can download this free software here.
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