Water Vole Risk Zones - East Anglia

This dataset identifies areas where the predicted distribution of water voles and has been categorised into zones relating to water vole occurrence and the level of impact development is likely to have on this species. Red zones contain stronghold populations of water voles, which are regionally important as defined by the number of observation records, connectivity importance, mean habitat suitability analysis score, area size, and length of watercourse within the area. These criteria were normalized and summed to rank their importance. The top 5% of sites were selected as red zones. Amber zones contain predicted suitable habitat for water voles (incorporating 90% of de-biased observations) and comprise important connecting habitat that aids natural dispersal. Amber areas are smoothed and where other amber areas are within 250m, these are connected. Green zones contain sparsely distributed water voles within 10m of a watercourse or inland water object. White zones are not predicted to contain resident water voles.