Guidance

Requirements for creating spatial data

Published 19 December 2025

Applies to England

This guide is for landowners and agents preparing to submit a felling licence or woodland management plan application to the Forestry Commission.

Share your spatial data with us

If you have created spatial data, for example, shapefiles or feature classes, in Geographic Information System (GIS) software while preparing a felling licence or woodland management plan application, you can send it to us to help speed up your application.

How to create and submit spatial data

1). Use your GIS software, for example, ArcGIS Pro or QGIS, to create the compartment maps.

2). When your compartment maps are ready, download your spatial data.

Check that your folder contains all of these file types to create the required spatial data:

• .dbf
• .shp
• .shx

Your folder may also contain extra file types, such as .prj and .qpj. You can leave these.

Delete .xml files if they appear in your data folder.

3). Email your exported data as a .zip file to your Operational Delivery Team hub. Send this with your application, or include a reference to your application in the email.

Forestry Commission spatial data requirements

Any spatial data you create must meet the GIS data requirements and contain 3 mandatory fields: comp, subcomp and totalha.

Your spatial data:

• must be within the boundary of England (includes offshore land part of England)
• must be projected in the British National Grid coordinate system (EPSG code: 27700)
• may contain holes (‘doughnut polygons’) if desired

Your spatial data must not:

• contain self-intersecting polygons (shapes that overlap themselves)
• be multi-part geometry (one row must equal one discrete sub-compartment)
• contain duplicate compartments or sub-compartments

We cannot accept spatial data containing non-polygon shapes (for example, points or lines), including data taken from GPS devices.

Ensure your compartment referencing (labels) matches across all your application documents. For example, if a compartment is labelled as ‘1a’, it must be recorded exactly as ‘1a’ in all associated spatial data files.

Mandatory fields

Your spatial data (shapefiles) must contain the following 3 mandatory fields.

1. Compartment

Field name	comp
Data type	Text
Contents requirements	Compartment number. Integer – whole numbers only. No additional text characters and no spaces before or after the number.

2. Sub-compartment

Field name	subcomp
Data type	Text
Contents requirements	Sub-compartment letter. No spaces before or after the letter or characters other than a single letter. You can leave this blank if sub-compartment lettering is not being used, or if it is not required in all instances of a compartment.

3. Total hectares

Field name	totalha
Data type	Non-integer (floating point numerical value)
Contents requirements	The area in hectares of the compartment/sub-compartment. Must contain a value. The value must not be 0 or a negative value. Use your GIS software functionality to generate the field value based on the geometry of the polygon.

Example: A field structure populated with data:

comp	subcomp	totalha
1	a	10.24
1	b	5.26
2		5.44

By sending us your spatial data, you agree we can use the data for any purpose needed to process and assess your application.

As a public authority we are subject to Freedom of Information and Environmental Information Regulations. We may be required to disclose any information we hold in compliance with the open information legislation.

Further information

If you’re applying online for a felling licence, refer to the Felling Licence Online user guides.

Read more about what you need to create a woodland management plan.