Comprehensive Habitat and Heritage Data: Wallington Estate 2024

Our Futurenauts documented 6,456 habitat polygons across 315 km² of the Wallington Estate and surrounding landscape. Combined with the 2,626 archaeological features from our 2023 mission, the National Trust now has a comprehensive cultural and ecological baseline for one of their most ambitious reforestation programmes.

The accuracy results here were the strongest of any mission in the programme. 44% of Deep Time grids achieved complete alignment with Living England survey data, and 77% either matched or outperformed machine-learning approaches. Most significantly, not a single grid performed below existing datasets, making Wallington the only mission where 100% of citizen-generated data proved either more accurate than or equal to professional mapping.

68% of participants reported feeling more connected to the Wallington landscape after the mission, despite the fact they were mapping remotely and never set foot on the estate itself.

The habitat data was shared with the National Trust to inform their conservation and reforestation decisions across the estate. Layered onto the archaeological mapping from 2023, it gives Wallington something genuinely useful for the long term – a detailed record of the landscape as it stands today, covering both its heritage and its ecology, against which changes from the Great Northumberland Forest Project can be measured over the coming decades.