EO4Biodiversity: Using Earth Observation to Support Early Planning Decisions

Biodiversity underpins healthy ecosystems, supporting both climate resilience and human wellbeing. In the UK, planning policy requires new developments to demonstrate a 10% biodiversity net gain. This is assessed using standardised biodiversity units, which are tied to habitat type and condition. Reliable habitat identification is therefore a key input to both planning and conservation. Practitioners can have a vast number of site development options to consider, balancing efficacy with potential for biodiversity gains. EO4Biodiversity supports screening of these options, making the task of narrowing down to a manageable set both efficient and effective. Our approach builds on the existing Natural England Living England broad habitat data and incrementally improves the classification of selected habitats using multispectral satellite data through GeoAImethods. The results are accessible through a web-based tool which allows users to upload proposed site boundaries, view mapped habitat evidence, adjust habitat attributes where survey data exists, and estimate biodiversity impacts using spatial analysis aligned with biodiversity metric rules. We show how GeoAIand Earth Observation can support improved habitat mapping and introduce the EO4Biodiversity prototype, which is being developed with support from the European Space Agency Incubed2 programme.