Wet Heath Remapping in SSSI Assessments: Are You Seeing This Too?

✅ KEY TAKEAWAY: Natural England’s expanding "wet heath" classifications threaten moorland management. Members must urgently share their Whole Feature Assessment experiences to help us coordinate a national, evidence-based response.

Moorland Association members are starting to see a recurring issue in Natural England’s SSSI condition work: rapid reclassification of large areas as “wet heath” (sometimes “wet heath mosaic” or “degraded wet heath”), often in places previously described in agreements and restoration plans as mostly dry heath or acid grassland with only limited wet heath.

This matters because wet heath is frequently treated as more “sensitive” in management terms, and a change in habitat label can have real consequences for burning/cutting consents, grazing discussions, and what gets prioritised for restoration funding - even where moorland managers feel the ground conditions and vegetation have not changed materially.

In practice, expanding “wet heath” mapping can narrow where burning/cutting is considered consentable and can influence the prescriptions and priorities written into future agreements and restoration plans.

If you’ve had a Whole Feature Assessment (WFA) where wet heath mapping has expanded materially compared with your agreement/SRP maps, please get in touch.

This will help us understand whether this is an isolated set of cases or a wider pattern, and whether a coordinated, evidence-based approach is needed nationally. If you can, please include the WFA summary sheet(s) and any habitat/feature maps (or screenshots); we can anonymise submissions if required.

• Get in touch by emailing: agilruth@moorlandassociation.org

What seems to be driving it

Natural England has moved to a newer approach to SSSI monitoring called a Whole Feature Assessment (WFA). Instead of reporting only by SSSI unit, condition is reported by notified feature across the whole SSSI. In practice, this often requires NE to remap where each feature occurs, and in several cases the mapped extent of “wet heath” appears to have expanded significantly.

In simple terms, wet heath is heathland on wet, impeded drainage soils, often associated with plants such as cross-leaved heath, and sometimes with Molinia and Sphagnum. In a recent case we are aware of, NE justified the wet heath call by reference to soil cores and the presence of gleyed soils (waterlogged soils with an underlying clay layer), alongside these vegetation signals.

Those indicators may be legitimate in some contexts - but the problem is that the boundary between wet heath, degraded blanket bog, and transitional mosaics is not always clear, and the label can become a proxy for a management outcome unless the evidence trail and decision rules are made explicit.

Why this is a problem for moorland managers

We are concerned for three reasons:

1) Habitat labels can change faster than the habitat itself Members are reporting situations where recent agreement documents (and historic site restoration plans) describe limited wet heath, yet WFAs subsequently map substantial areas as wet heath or wet heath mosaic. Where changes are justified as “improved understanding,” managers still need a clear audit trail showing what evidence changed and how the decision was made.

2) “Wet heath” can be used to constrain management without a clear evidential trail If wet heath is treated as “sensitive,” its expanded extent can influence what is considered acceptable management - especially around controlled burning/cutting and grazing.

3) Confusion between soil/peat definitions and habitat definitions There is a real risk of inconsistent application of rules (e.g. peat depth thresholds vs habitat community definitions). Where peat is deeper, areas described as wet heath may, in other frameworks, be considered degraded blanket bog or restorable bog. If that’s the case, the management implications can be materially different.

What we think a “good” NE process should look like

This is not about arguing for a particular label. It’s about transparency and consistency. Where NE identifies wet heath, we believe it should be accompanied by:

1. the definition/standard being applied (eg. CSM/NVC basis).

2. the decision rule used to distinguish wet heath from blanket bog and transitional mosaics.

3. the soil-core record (locations, peat depth, presence/absence of gleyed layer).

4. the mapped layer showing the final habitat extents used in the assessment.

5. enough stop-level information to understand why a feature passed or failed particular attributes.

If members are experiencing large re-labelling of habitat without that evidence trail, that is exactly what we need to understand as an Association.

We’d like to hear from you

If you have had any of the following experiences in the last 12-24 months, please consider sharing:

• A WFA or condition assessment that expanded wet heath / wet heath mosaic significantly compared with earlier plans/agreements

• Restrictions or consent discussions where “wet heath” designation appears to be driving the outcome

• Confusion or inconsistency between peat depth, “blanket bog”, and “wet heath” mapping

• A refusal to provide the soil-core logs / GIS layers / decision rule underpinning habitat delineation

• Any examples where the WFA text and summary sheets are internally inconsistent (eg. on which units a feature occurs).

Please email us with:

• the site name (or general area, if you prefer)

• the NE area team

• what changed (briefly)

• any documents you can share (WFA summaries, maps, correspondence)

• Get in touch by emailing: agilruth@moorlandassociation.org 

As always, we will treat member submissions sensitively and can anonymise examples if they are used for wider engagement. The aim is to determine whether this is an isolated set of cases or a broader pattern, and then decide whether a coordinated, evidence-based approach is needed with Natural England nationally.