Owen Boswarva's blog

In July the wildlife campaign group Wild Justice published a short report on the status of biological Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs) in England: A Sight for Sore SSSIs.

SSSIs are sites designated under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 because they support characteristic, rare and endangered species, habitats and/or natural features.

The Wild Justice report contained an analysis of the condition of SSSIs by area, based on data disclosed by Natural England in response to an access to information request.

I asked Natural England for a copy of the SSSI data disclosed to Wild Justice. In early September, Natural England sent me an Excel workbook containing that data, and a second workbook containing a more recent version (extracted on 11 August).

You can download the data and correspondence: EIR2023_00530.zip (19 MB)

What is this data?

The Excel workbooks contain, for each SSSI unit:

SSSI name and ID
unit name
area in hectares
main habitat
condition status and assessment date
monitored feature name
feature condition and assessment date

For purposes of mapping and analysis, the data in the workbooks can be appended (via the unit ID) to spatial data available in Sites of Special Scientific Interest Units (England), an open dataset published on Natural England's Geoportal.

Licensing for re-use

Natural England originally released this detailed data on the condition of SSSI units in England to me with a copyright notice that restricted re-use.

But I submitted a complaint and Natural England has now provided a metadata file with confirmation that the data is re-usable under the Open Government Licence.

This means the data is open and you can re-use it for any purpose, provided you attribute the source of the data. I recommend the following attribution statement: