134 - Dorset Downs and Cranborne Chase : Detailed Statements of Environmental Opportunity

This section expands on the Headline Statements of Environmental Opportunity and provides further detail on each of the Statements of Environmental Opportunity.

SEO 1

SEO1: Plan for and manage changes in the agricultural landscape by encouraging and supporting business choices that balance food production with protecting soils and water, enhancing ecosystems (particularly those associated with semi-natural grasslands) and restoring ecosystem services.

For example by:

• Identifying and encouraging the uptake of a system of payment for ecosystem services to protect and enhance these, and to allow land managers to make business choices that will have long-term benefits.
• Making sure that future incentives promote multiple outcomes – regardless of where they are For example, biodiversity, archaeology, landscape character, aquifer recharge and recreational opportunities could all be enhanced via a single scheme, if located correctly.
• Ensuring that sufficient resources are delivered in the right places, based on evidence, to create a functioning, resilient ecological network of habitats and species.
• Explaining the key role played by the geology and geomorphology of the NCA in supporting the fundamental ecosystem services of water, food and biodiversity provision.
• Making available robust and accessible evidence about which ecosystems services are most influenced by positive approaches in land management, the semi-natural habitats and geodiversity that underpin them and how and where to repair ecosystem services for the widest benefits.
• Restoring and re-creating important areas of semi-natural calcareous grassland and broadleaved woodland, increasing their resilience and function as an ecological network – using the Lawton principles of more, bigger, better and joined habitats.
• Identifying key potential impacts of climate change on grassland and woodland habitats, and targeting climate change adaptation actions accordingly.
• Identifying sources of silt entering the NCA’s streams and Taking action that will reduce this, at the same time as enhancing biodiversity and landscape character.
• Using an integrated, catchment-based approach to continue to reduce the amounts of nitrate- and phosphate-based nutrients entering surface and groundwater systems from both diffuse and point sources.
• Aiming to expand the Frome and Piddle catchment initiative approach to all the rivers rising in and flowing through the area. Maximising their biodiversity value, integrating them with adjacent land uses, and reducing the transfer of nutrients and sediment to downstream assets such as Poole Harbour.
• Increasing land managers’ understanding of the importance of the soil resource, and of the need for its sympathetic management for the delivery of a range of benefits and services, and to enable better control of the costs of agricultural production.
• Ensuring that the NCA’s suite of Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and Natura 2000 sites are brought into favourable condition, and then well maintained.
• Increasing the density and permeability of the ‘matrix’ of small-scale, connecting habitats that provide a refuge for natural predators and pollinators, using a systematic and landscape-scale approach.

SEO 2

SEO 2: Manage and enhance the historic character of the NCA, including the rich assemblage of settlement and field patterns, heritage features (including prehistoric assets), and the patterns of woodland, vegetation and geodiversity that give the NCA its sense of place.

For example by:

• Using an understanding of the NCA’s historic landscape character – the result of how human and natural forces have interacted over millennia – as a framework for sustainable development and enhancing biodiversity.
• Implementing the objectives and actions contained in both the Dorset AONB Management Plan, and the Cranborne Chase and West Wiltshire Downs AONB Management Plan.
• Giving high regard to the guidelines contained in the various Landscape Character Assessments that cover this NCA, particularly those of the Dorset AONB and the Cranborne Chase and West Wiltshire Downs AONB.
• Implementing the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) guidance that ‘Great weight should be given to conserving landscape and scenic beauty in National Parks, the Broads and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which have the highest status of protection in relation to landscape and scenic ‘
• Implementing the recommendations of the Cranborne Chase and West Wiltshire Downs AONB Historic Landscape Character Assessment and the Historic Environment Action Plan (HEAP).
• Avoiding developments with damaging impacts on the character of the Where development is unavoidable, ensuring that measures are put in place to mitigate or (in the final instance) compensate for damage.
• Keeping the scale and style of developments within the villages and hamlets of the NCA, sympathetic to their Making sensitive use of redundant buildings, and always reflecting local vernacular and settlement form.
• Ensuring that the underpinning nature of the NCA’s geology and geomorphology is used to contextualise the evolution of the landscape character we see today.
• Ensuring that the materials and skills essential for repairing and building structures in the local vernacular are still available.
• Maintaining the historic parks and gardens of the NCA at their historic extent, and preferably with management considered as a whole. This will help to prevent fragmentation, and will ensure the cohesion and continuity of features and character.
• Re-connecting woodlands with their past cultural Bringing underused native broadleaved woodland into new, productive, economically viable uses, enhancing landscape character and biodiversity/ecosystem function.
• Articulating the links between prehistoric and ancient landscape features, and the ancient calcareous grassland habitats within which they are often located. Identifying locations where the setting and presentation of historic assets might be enhanced through re- establishing species-rich grassland.
• Maintaining, restoring and, where appropriate, introducing features that enhance the landscape character of the NCA, such as hedgerows, hill-top clumps, copses and coverts.
• Understanding the implications of environmental changes and pathogens, and planning potential responses in terms of vegetation Paying particular attention to the loss of ash from ash die- back, and the loss of beech from drought and wind throw.
• Conserving historic features in the landscape that have heritage interest, including the field systems, water meadow infrastructure and other archaeological features.
• Conserving and interpreting archaeological earthworks and sub-surface archaeology, while recognising the potential for undiscovered remains.
• Improving the condition of heritage assets through appropriate measures and seeking to reduce conflicting or unsympathetic management regimes, while recognising the high potential in this landscape for undiscovered remains.
• Continuing to protect the 1,100 Scheduled Monuments and 2,825 Listed Buildings in the NCA, via the provision of advice and incentives.
• Avoiding and reducing light pollution from villages, roads, and recreational and industrial sites.

SEO 3

SEO 3: Manage and enhance the recreational and educational potential of the NCA in a way that clearly shows the links between people and the landscape, and between geodiversity, ecosystems and the services they provide. Aim to heighten people’s enjoyment, appreciation and understanding of the NCA, as well as their ability to take positive, informed action to enjoy and conserve their surroundings.

For example by:

• Maintaining and enhancing the rights-of-way network and open access land throughout the area.
• Developing new, permissive access to historical sites, open access land and other areas of interest, as part of a cohesive network of inspiring access provision.
• Explaining the intimate relationship between geodiversity, human occupation and land use history in the NCA.
• Taking opportunities to increase and improve the area of accessible natural greenspace in places that are currently poorly served, as in certain rural areas.
• Promoting sustainable tourism initiatives that target a broad range of visitors, allowing farm businesses to diversify. This simultaneously
  exploits and conserves the landscape, its biodiversity and its tranquillity.
• Supporting the whole-landscape approach adopted by the South Dorset Ridgeway Landscape Partnership, and investigating whether this can be used elsewhere in the NCA.
• Making full use of the NCA to explain and illustrate the form and function of karstic landscapes, and to explain how geomorphological processes have produced some of our most highly regarded and culturally significant landscape types.
• Using the distinct identity of the NCA to create cohesive and thought- provoking stories for visitors and residents alike.
• Maintaining the high levels of tranquillity that can be experienced within the NCA. Additionally, enhancing the experience of tranquillity at certain locations, for example through the creation of semi-natural habitats and the removal of eyesores.
• Promoting the inspirational qualities of the NCA; exploring the cultural imprints of 8,000 years of occupation that are still so clearly legible in the landscape; celebrating the rise of modern archaeology; reviewing the depiction of the NCA in the arts; and understanding the changing relationship between the landscape and the people who lived – and live – in it.