SAERI Falklands Limited (SFL) and St Helena Government are partnering on the JNCC-led DPLUS154 project: Sustainable management planning for St Helena's National Conservation Areas.

St Helena’s iconic, and highly endemic, biodiversity is of international importance. The Island’s ‘nature’ National Conservation Areas (NCA), cover 38% of the island, helping protect the 502 endemic, and 38 globally threatened native species. To secure the legal status of the NCAs, 13 sustainable-use NCA management plans, analytical tools and framework to monitor their effectiveness is being developed.

Part of SFLs role in this project has been to provide data collection and management for each of these NCAs. This required identifying currently available data and identifying knowledge gaps, before outputting the results to a WebGIS interactive map (see attached photo). By clipping all datasets by the NCA boundaries, irrelevant information is filtered out and avoids misrepresentation for each area.

This work will be ongoing and the new Project Officer based on St. Helena will continue over the course of the next year to develop the management plans for the NCAs.