Written by Fiona Torrance, Farmland Biodiversity Advisor and PepsiCo FAB Project Manager
With nearly 70% of Scotland’s land used for agriculture, farmers will play a key role in addressing the biodiversity and climate crises which have been declared by the Scottish Government. In order to document what habitats are present and their condition, NatureScot has been developing tools to help farmers to quantify their habitats and how they are performing.
As reported in a previous blog, the PepsiCo FAB project has been assisting NatureScot to test these new habitat scoring tools since 2023. Initially, this involved going through draft habitat scoring assessments, and was followed by using their proposed habitat mapping protocol. Initial results were successful, with farmers finding the app easy to use, as well as increasing their interest and knowledge in some of the habitats on their farms.
Photo credit: Amy Mason
Testing tools such as these is incredibly important. Not only for practical reasons such as identifying bugs, errors or functionality issues, but also for the benefit for farmers. In order to be successful, the system needs to be easy to use, robust, as well as practical for the tens of thousands of farms spread across Scotland, and NatureScot has strived to ensure this process has been as thorough as possible.
Fast forward to 2025 and the FAB project has been involved with the next phase of the rollout. Since 2023, NatureScot has been working behind the scenes to combine the habitat mapping and scorecard tools into one app, FarmBioScot. During the last two years, work has been done to refine the scorecards to better reflect the diversity of farms across Scotland, as well as making the habitat mapping aspect as user-friendly as possible.
During last autumn, the team were out in the field, going through the app with farmers and assessing how it functions for them. Again, feedback has been generally positive, with the app simple to use and questions easy to follow, with the species ID function being particularly useful. Further testing will be required as new scorecards come online, but initial results have been encouraging.
Dr Celine Delabre, Agriculture Officer at NatureScot, said: “We’ve very grateful for all the input and feedback we have been getting from the FAB cluster, and the wider farming community in Scotland for NatureScot’s Farm Biodiversity Project. We understand that starting to integrate biodiversity into day to day farming is not always straightforward, depending on your farming system and the other business commitments. So we’re really keen to design a tool that enables farmers to easily get started and help them see their farm with a different pair of eyes.”
With more testing planned for 2026, we look forward to continuing to work with NatureScot as they develop these tools, and to helping our farmers enhance biodiversity in a practical way.