Landscape assessment
- Review landscape restoration strategies
- Provide regional context – including potential for bird-strike
- Identify regional priorities
- Identify and prioritise a range of possible restoration strategies
- Outline the hydrological / hydrogeological requirements
Land affected by mineral workings provides a unique opportunity for change on a significant scale in a region. Water-based restoration schemes in particular can help to create, conserve and enhance a network of semi-natural wetland habitats, ecological corridors and community assets on former mineral workings.
Benefits to the landscape may include:
- Protecting and enhancing biodiversity e.g. meeting local and National Biodiversity Action Plan targets.
- Providing a wide range of recreational opportunities for local communities from participation in water sports to improved access to attractive surroundings.
- Contributing to the local economy through providing new amenities, employment and business opportunities and attracting tourists.
- Encouraging a sense of place and local pride through improving areas of formerly degraded landscape quality, or strengthening local landscape character and local distinctiveness.
- Involving and empowering local communities in making decisions about their environment. A successful new landscape depends on afteruse development that is in keeping with the values and aspirations of the communities who live and work there.
- Preserving cultural heritage and promoting understanding of an area’s historic landscapes.
- Protecting water resources e.g. through helping to meet targets of the Water Framework Directive.
- Flood alleviation for riverside villages and larger settlements.
- Carefully designing wetlands in the flight path of airfields to avoid attracting flocks of birds to balance the risk of bird strike against other local factors.
- Water-based quarry restoration can fit in with agri-environment schemes (eg Environmental Stewardship), which rewards landowners for actively managing land sustainably to benefit ecology, landscape, public access, flood alleviation.
Landscape character assessments can help planners and the minerals industry identify the factors that give a location a unique sense of place. Through the development of thoughtful and sensitive afteruse plans, the minerals industry has the potential to strengthen the local landscape character and setting, and thereby enhance people’s sense of cultural identity and their connection and pride with the local area.
Mineral companies often have a considerable land bank (freehold or leasehold) over which they have control or influence. This includes currently operational sites, restored areas, proposed future extraction areas and land which will never be worked. An integrated approach to management of these areas will provide for an optimum site afteruse strategy.
Some of the aims and issues for specific water-based quarry restoration/afteruse in terms of landscape setting and landscape design to be considered are:
- To protect, conserve and manage areas of historic, archaeological and cultural value to ensure that the environment is maintained for the benefit of present and future generations.
- The new development should improve degraded areas and strengthen the character and local distinctiveness of the landscape. It is essential that afteruse development is in keeping with the local landscape and the values and aspiration of the communities who live and work there.
- Through the creation of waterbodies and wetland sites there is potential to provide considerable amenity benefits to the local and national communities. This may improve the public perception of quarrying operations.
- The creation of waterbodies frequently attracts birds such as waterfowl and gulls, which may congregate in large numbers. This may increase the risk of bird strike where the waterbody is situated on the flight path of an airfield. The Ministry of Defence is now opposing the creation of all waterbodies within 13 km of airbases; however, with thought to design, extensive and valuable wetland habitats can be created that the MOD and CAA are satisfied with.
Quarry restoration design often incorporates the geomorphological context of the site and should aim to be constructed with natural slopes and landforms (eg crags, screes) consistent with those in the locality. An alternative approach is to accept the boldness of the quarry landscape.