28th August 2025
Mycelia allows us to review Metrics in minutes rather than hours
The Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) details submitted with planning applications often include a large amount of complex, dense, technical ecological information, especially the quantitative data within the Statutory Biodiversity Metric.
Consequently, assessing the Biodiversity Metric can take a long time, even for experienced ecologists such as myself, and it’s difficult for non-ecologists to engage with the details.
Additionally, the complexity of the information means that it’s often difficult to catch all the issues and risks embedded within the planning application.
At West Oxfordshire, this puts a strain on our internal resources and caused delays for applicants.
Turning complex data into actionable insight with Mycelia
Mycelia helps us by making the Biodiversity Metric quicker and easier to review for the whole team and throughout the planning process. It analyses the metric and presents the information in a clear and accessible way by:
- Highlighting ecological risks: It automatically identifies potential risks across four key categories (baseline, interventions, losses, and size/length/trees), focusing our attention on the most commonly occurring issues.
- Supporting quick and accurate decision making: By presenting the Biodiversity Metric as an interactive flow diagram, Mycelia helps us understand the calculations quickly and clearly, so we can draw conclusions and identify issues with the proposals, including the treatment of certain habitats.
- The historical imagery features allow us to identify when sites have been cleared, testing the information given by the applicant.
- Freeing-up expert time: The council’s ecology team can focus their expertise on complex ecological judgements rather than spending hours on manual data checks.
- The same functionality also provides instant checks at the point of condition discharge: Mycelia verifies that the final metric has zero errors, so we know we can discharge the condition within a shorter timeframe where the Biodiversity Gain Plan matches.
Mycelia makes it much easier to assess Biodiversity Net Gain information. It speeds up the process for ecologists and allows non-ecologists to meaningfully engage with the calculations and the BNG approach.
Faster, more collaborative and risk-aware assessment
Mycelia allows us to review metrics in minutes rather than hours, saving our ecologists a significant amount of time and helping us to manage risk more reliably.
Our next step is to empower our planning colleagues to engage with the BNG information using Mycelia, so that they can identify when to escalate to an ecologist, particularly in cases where the Small Sites Metric is used.
Achieving this will lead to a more efficient and collaborative workflow that will help us respond to planning consultations quicker, provide a better experience for case officers and applicants, and ensure that development has better environmental outcomes for West Oxfordshire.
Steps we’re taking to increase the engagement of planning officers include:
- Training sessions delivered by our Principal Ecologist.
- Sharing Mycelia’s support pages and explanatory articles.
- Written process flows and FAQs for easy reference.
- Weekly 30-minute drop-in surgeries for planners to ask questions of biodiversity officers.
In summary, using Mycelia has helped us to provide quicker ecological responses to planning applications and with increased confidence that we’ve identified the key risks associated with the BNG proposals. Ultimately, this helps us to drive better environmental outcomes for our local community in West Oxfordshire.