To aid Buckinghamshire County Council to have a baseline of environment, land-use and landscape data the Natural Environment Team have been working on the development of a strategic analysis tool called BLIS. Much of the work behind BLIS has been funded through County Council’s Spatial Planning funds and has taken over three years to develop. Once finalised, this integrated system will be of value to spatial planning, development control, master planning and land management professionals helping to inform Local Development Frameworks and SAs and provide an important means for testing development proposals, assessing sensitivity and impact. More information on the project and access to some of the data from BLIS is available in the link below.
Landscape Character Assessments
Key to the future development of BLIS and the need to fully test proposals by HS2 Ltd is the need to have fine-grain Landscape Character Assessments for whole the County. The recent support from Wycombe, South Bucks and Chiltern District Councils ensures that this work will now be progressing and will be finalised by March 2011.