42 - Lincolnshire Coast and Marshes : 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

SEO 1: Safeguard, manage and enhance the dynamic coastal landscape producing net gains in extent and quality of internationally and nationally important habitats including sand dunes, salt marsh, mudflats, saline lagoons, reedbeds and grazing marsh for the wildlife they support, to increase ecological resilience and to increase the landscape’s ability to mitigate flood risk and climate change.

For example by:

• Protecting intertidal habitats and dune formations (among the best of their type anywhere in the UK) including saline lagoons, and ensuring that they are adequately managed.
• Seeking opportunities to increase the extent of sand dune habitats and manage them for their species, in particular ensuring that they are adequately protected.
• Seeking opportunities to increase the extent of intertidal habitats – including salt marsh, reedbeds and mudflats – to provide effective defences against wave energy and to protect and enhance biodiversity value.
• Enabling the natural and dynamic coastal and estuarine processes to continue, so that the coastline and estuary can respond to the constantly changing patterns of accretion and erosion.
• Enabling sand dunes such as those in the National Nature Reserves (NNRs), including Gibraltar Point, to evolve as naturally as possible with limited intervention, maintaining access to key facilities with minimal interruption to natural coastal processes.
• Providing access to sites of geological or geomorphological interest and providing interpretation, to raise awareness and improve understanding of the dynamic processes under way.
• Monitoring and researching natural and man-influenced coastal processes to improve understanding and working with partners to find ways of helping these dynamic processes to ensure no net loss of features.
• Responding to rising sea levels by seeking opportunities to realign flood defences or provide soft flood defences, thus allowing the development of intertidal habitats to compensate for any losses arising from coastal squeeze, maintaining their role in storing carbon and ensuring that new sites are managed to enhance the biodiversity value of the coast and estuary and contribute to its expansive landscape character.
• Working in partnership, informed by the Shoreline Management Plan (Flamborough Head to Gibraltar Point Shoreline Management Plan, Humber Estuary Coastal Authorities Group, 2009), to ensure that dynamic coastal processes continue and to conserve the range of coastal and wetland habitats that contribute to landscape character and support the wide range of wildlife.
• Conserving and managing the nationally significant coastal and marsh landscape, implementing strategies to adapt to coastal change and sea level rise.
• Planning for the effects of coastal change: allowing the operation of natural coastal processes and the creation of new habitats, to maintain and enhance local landscape character and biodiversity; improving the sustainability of current management practices; and reducing flooding in built areas.
• Seeking opportunities to develop joint strategies in relation to the delivery of the Shoreline Management Plan and Catchment Flood Management Plans, ensuring that flood risk and waterways are managed effectively to protect settlements.
• Encouraging natural coastal processes to allow dynamism and natural sediment movement so that habitats and species can naturally extend and adapt in order to help them to become resilient to natural coastal processes. In appropriate areas along the coastline, allowing essential sediment transportation to create intertidal habitats and natural sea defences and enhance the landscape character of the coast.
• Ensuring that managed realignment sites and new flood storage areas are managed to create wetland habitats that contribute to landscape character and biodiversity, with some public access.
• Safeguarding the geological and current geomorphological processes, particularly along the internationally important coastline. Where possible, allowing the unimpaired operation of natural coastal processes, resulting in the creation of new habitats, conserving and enhancing landscape character and benefiting biodiversity and the historic environment.
• Raising awareness of the importance of the roosting and feeding areas for birds around the coast, ensuring that these areas are adequately protected and managed.
• Working in partnership to accommodate large numbers of overwintering birds and significant colonies of breeding terns. The feeding and wintering habitats are required for internationally important numbers of birds and waders during the spring and autumn passage periods. Many of the birds essentially feed outside the Special Protection Area in nearby waters and roost and feed inland at high tide.

SEO 2

SEO 2: Conserve and enhance the historic features and settlement character of the dispersed rural villages and market towns of the Middle Marsh and Outmarsh and the fishing heritage of the port of Grimsby. Encourage a strategic approach to land use planning to conserve and enhance the historic landscape and heritage features, encouraging initiatives which contribute towards green tourism, enhance green infrastructure links, manage the pressures of flood risk and climate change, and ensure that infrastructure developments, such as offshore wind turbines do not contribute negatively to the character of the area.

For example by:

• Raising awareness of the historic environment and character of the area and how it results from millennia of human and natural factors.
• Conserving and enhancing the heritage features and assets of rural areas and towns, from prehistoric sites to the fishing heritage of Grimsby.
• Working in partnership with landowners and farmers to conserve and enhance the landscape and protect the heritage assets and landscape features in the environment of the coast and the marsh.
• Addressing past losses of grazing marsh by providing incentives for retaining remaining habitat and restoring and creating additional areas to ensure habitat is available for breeding and wintering wetland bird populations and populations of other species which benefit from a pastoral landscape.
• Managing, expanding, buffering and linking the existing ancient woodlands on the border of the Wolds and Middle Marsh.
• Conserving and managing the few remaining species-rich lowland meadows in the area.
• Managing watercourses to provide clear biodiversity benefits for wetland species such as water voles for which this area is a national stronghold.
• Managing the historic environment for its contribution to local character and sense of identity and as a framework for habitat restoration and sustainable development.
• Supporting the strategic approach to assimilating new industrial development, in particular on the coast, to ensure co-ordination of changes so that the internationally significant biodiversity is protected and enhanced.
• Seeking opportunities to establish strategic habitat mitigation areas to ensure that the impact of future growth and development on the estuary is appropriately managed and compensated for. Seeking opportunities for biodiversity offsetting.
• Carefully planning new industrial complexes and structures so that they are integrated into local landscape character, by retaining key views, landscape features and sites of nature conservation value, and creating new habitats, thus ensuring that industrial sites have areas that are ‘permeable’ and can link with networks of connected habitats.
• Halting the expansion of intrusive caravan sites within the open/ undeveloped coast which impact on the character of the area.
• Ensuring that planning decisions adequately address the vital role that areas landward of the flood defences play in supporting the internationally important bird populations, and that new wetlands and grasslands are established to form effective corridors and stepping- stone habitats which extend the resources available to wildlife and enable species movement.
• Encouraging nature conservation management and the conservation of geological features.
• Seeking to enhance and extend habitats, creating a sustainable network for wildlife. Enhancing the simple patterns of fields, woodlands, ditches, rivers and tributaries and their strong links to past land use and settlement. This will bring benefits in terms of reducing soil erosion, improving soil quality and water availability, regulating water flow, promoting the interpretation of the historic environment, enhancing biodiversity and supporting pastoral farming.
• Seeking opportunities where appropriate to plant trees and create small areas of woodland to reduce flood flows. Such woodland areas and semi-natural areas will assist in reducing rapid run off of water during high rainfall.
• Protecting the Lincolnshire Wolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) and working in partnership to implement the adopted Lincolnshire Wolds Management Plan 2013-2018 (a small part of the Lincolnshire Wolds AONB is located in the National Character Area (NCA).
• Protecting the Lincolnshire chalk streams and associated habitats which are important in terms of Biodiversity 2020.
• Protecting the flat, open, low-lying Outmarsh for its remote and tranquil character which is enjoyed by walkers, its archaeological assets which provide a link to the past, and its drained pasture fields.
• Adopting the area’s traditional and historic architecture and its distinctive patterns of settlement to plan for and inspire new development, using appropriate local building materials and vernacular styles in restoring buildings and structures.
• Enhancing green infrastructure links within the area, especially within and beyond the towns, ensuring that there are places to benefit people and wildlife.
• Exploring opportunities for and encouraging green tourism.
• Improving access to the coast for walking, cycling and disabled people through the sustainable use of old railway lines, tracks and paths and encouraging reduced car use. Securing opportunities for the public to enjoy the natural environment through the implementation of the England Coast Path while ensuring appropriate protection of it.
• Ensuring promotion of access opportunities educates people about the vulnerability of the coastal habitats in the NCA and encourages visits of a low-impact nature which avoid any adverse impacts on agricultural management, landscape, habitats and wildlife.

SEO 3

SEO 3: Ensure sustainable food production while enhancing and strengthening the network of farmland features; manage, expand, create and link habitats within the Outmarsh and Middle Marsh to benefit biodiversity, soil and water quality by promoting farming and forestry practices that are able to adapt to climate change. Manage the rivers, water levels and the provision and quality of water in the whole catchment for human and ecological benefit.

For example by:

• Promoting sustainable but productive farming practices that are able to adapt to changing agricultural economics and climate change including maintenance of remaining permanent pasture. Important not only for wildlife but also carbon storage and also historical environment where there is ridge and furrow.
• Working in partnership to ensure that water levels are carefully managed to provide multiple benefits such as protecting wetlands and watercourses which are vulnerable to abstraction, reducing flooding, vegetation succession and altered land management. Managing and expanding the wetland habitats, including wet pasture, fens and reedbeds and, where appropriate, wet woodland. Creating washlands and wetland priority habitats within them, where appropriate.
• Seeking opportunities to maintain and improve water quality and provision from the chalk aquifer by working with farmers and land managers to adopt practices that improve filtration into the ground and reduce nutrient run-off.
• Managing the priority habitats such as the chalk streams and blow wells and associated adjacent areas.
• Creating buffer zones and other measures to reduce erosion and pollution of the wider environment. Reducing the use of pesticides and other chemical/nutrient inputs, resulting in less diffuse pollution. Complying with regulations on nitrate vulnerable zones which cover the majority of the NCA.
• Conserving productive soils for continued agricultural production while ensuring that the agricultural landscapes make a greater contribution to wildlife, especially farmland birds, and avoiding or reducing cultivation where there are archaeological features.
• Creating, expanding and linking habitats to benefit biodiversity, including grazing marsh.
• Conserving, managing and expanding semi-natural habitats that reveal the influence of underlying soils and hydrological conditions.
• Encouraging agricultural practices such as planting winter cover crops, infield grass areas to prevent run-off, permanent grassland with low inputs and buffer strips on cultivated land adjacent to uncultivated land.
• Enhancing the network of habitats and farmland features: managing hedges, hedgerow trees, watercourses and farm ponds. Encouraging linear habitats and sympathetically managing boundary features as corridors and stepping-stones. Hedge planting as well as restoration should be encouraged – especially where many of the older small grass fields are surrounded by hedges.
• Planning for new woodland planting only at appropriate locations, especially where this would be beneficial in creating new green infrastructure routes or integrating new development into the landscape. Woodland planting would be restricted mainly in the western edge of the Middle Marsh where woodland forms part of the existing landscape character.
• Planting individual trees in the Outmarsh rather than woodland in order to avoid changes to the existing landscape character and to retain the open views.
• Carefully managing historical assets including areas of ridge and furrow in the environment.
• Creating a mosaic of productive land, with healthy ecological networks of semi-natural and managed habitats, which can meet food supply demands without the loss of associated species.
• Restoring and creating habitats, with appropriate traditional management techniques in place – especially using more traditional breeds of livestock.
• Encouraging partnership work and, benefiting from the experiences of the Lincolnshire Coastal Grazing Marshes Project and which has concentrated on target areas in the southern part of the NCA. Retain and manage remaining areas, increasing of wet grassland and redress recent losses by providing incentives to increase the amount of wet grassland and grazing marsh as lowland meadows have been lost to alternative farming systems and wildlife-rich and pastoral grassland is an important element of Greater Lincolnshire’s biodiversity.
• Managing natural rivers for water quality, water availability and biodiversity. Managing the network of catchment drains, dykes and canals for improved water quality, water availability and their contribution to biodiversity.
• Managing the reservoirs through reducing saline intrusion, aiding aquifer recharge, and developing these for recreational opportunities.
• Protecting the mosaic of terrestrial habitats for birds’ roosting, feeding and breeding.

SEO 4

SEO 4: Conserve and enhance the character of the traditional seaside resorts and the long sandy beaches which help to make the area an important tourist destination; improve opportunities to enhance people’s enjoyment of the undeveloped areas along the wild coast with its expansive coast and marsh landscape and its coastal features and wildlife, while protecting high levels of tranquillity and the extensive, open views both inland to the Wolds and also out to sea.

For example by:

• Working in partnership with landowners and farmers to achieve mutually satisfactory objectives, managing and promoting opportunities for sustainable access and outdoor recreation.
• Implementing strategies to adapt to coastal change and sea level rise, while improving people’s enjoyment of the area through enhancing its unique assemblage of coastal habitats and increasing opportunities for sustainably managed access.
• Developing initiatives to encourage access to and engagement in local greenspace and the wild coast, providing recreation and health benefits. Incorporating greenspaces into any new developments to ensure a connection with semi-natural habitats in order to benefit wildlife while providing opportunities for recreation – such as in Grimsby, Cleethorpes, Mablethorpe and Skegness.
• Retaining the open character of the landscape with its expansive views and big skies. Protecting areas with a strong sense of remoteness, wildness and tranquillity and dark skies.
• Conserving quiet rural areas by encouraging sensitive development, respecting long and open views and enhancing the character of rural settlements and traditional buildings.
• Improving opportunities to enhance people’s enjoyment of the open, expansive coast and marsh landscape and its coastal features and wildlife, extending the traditional visitor season, while protecting high levels of tranquillity.
• Raising awareness of the important sensitive habitats and the wildlife that the coastal environment supports such as coastal dunes, tern, and common and grey seals.
• Offering opportunities for improved health and wellbeing by providing public access to the natural environment from the urban areas and coastal resorts and improving the rights of way network and links to the countryside and coastal resorts. Exploring opportunities for coastal access and improving links to and engagement with the coastal country parks and other countryside sites.
• Protecting open views and the simple, open character of the landscape and seascape, enhancing access to and interpretation of the wealth of natural and heritage assets, and recreational opportunities, throughout the area (including the NNRs, the Lincolnshire Coastal Country Park and AONB).
• Developing a continuous stretch of coastal habitat behind the dunes between Chapel Point and Sandilands via the Lincolnshire Coastal Country Park.
• Planning for new development in larger settlements to be in keeping with existing character, well designed and sited to reduce visual intrusion. Adopting the area’s traditional and historic architecture and its distinctive patterns of settlement to plan for and inspire new development. Using appropriate local building materials and vernacular styles in restoring buildings and structures.
• Seeking opportunities to improve green infrastructure links to the AONB which overlaps the adjacent Lincolnshire Wolds NCA and working in partnership to implement the adopted Lincolnshire Wolds Management Plan 2013-2018.
• Recording, managing and protecting the cultural and historic landscape associated with the area and also understanding and exploring the related key communication and trading routes. Improving heritage education opportunities and interpretation, working with and through local partnerships and communities.
• Protecting the important and accessible ‘Blue Flag’ beaches on the coast which are essential to tourism. Ensuring that the coastal dunes are conserved and protected from damage resulting from recreational pressure, through the development of a strategy for coastal public access management.
• Conserving and enhancing the remaining character of the East Coast seaside towns and resorts to improve them for the local community and to increase their attractiveness as tourist destinations.