Biodiversity data driving nature net gain for infrastructure projects

National Highways made a commitment to deliver biodiversity net gain (BNG) across their land that runs adjacent to motorway and trunk road network. The government-owned company, like other UK businesses, must also adhere to government BNG regulations. In 2025, all nationally significant infrastructure projects must deliver a 10% biodiversity net gain.

To reach a 10% net gain, National Highways need to monitor biodiversity changes across their land assets. This is where Ramboll’s Galago Team came in to help generate biodiversity data, in order to provide insights necessary to inform these commitments and regulations, in turn guiding any necessary management and intervention activities. Galago by Ramboll is a geospatial intelligence team who have developed a range of innovative solutions used for sustainable land management and biodiversity restoration.

To monitor biodiversity across the Strategic Road Network (SRN) in an accurate, defensible, repeatable, and cost-effective manner, our team created a prototype solution. That protype produced network-wide digital maps of landcover and habitat types using satellite imagery and machine learning.

To help with habitat predictions, Galago created a cloud-optimised data processing and modelling pipeline. The pipeline used hundreds of multi-temporal satellite images and collated training data to create well-performing machine learning models which effectively predicted habitat types across the SRN. This solution:

• Mapped the 14 most common landcover types across all designated areas
• Generated an annual overview of those landcover types including a retrospective view of biodiversity performance with archive data
• Calculated biodiversity units across the network

Most significantly, our solution offers repeatability for annual monitoring purposes and efficiency relative to conventional methods. By applying this solution, our client can now: