The ESA, (Environmentally Sensitive Areas scheme), was set
up by the Scottish Office Agricultural and Fisheries Department.
The main aim of the scheme is to enhance and conserve the
natural beauty of Scotland's most marginal agricultural areas.

At the outset of the scheme, a monitoring programme was
developed which covered both the schemes impact on habitats
and the landscape as a whole. The habitats monitoring was
undertaken by the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology and Macaulay
Land Use Research Institute. Scottish Natural Heritage
appointed John Richards Landscape Architects to devise the
Landscape Monitoring part of the programme.

At the outset, field work was carried out to identify the landscape
character types which made up each of Scotland's ten ESA areas.
Based upon this field work, ten fully illustrated reports were
prepared which discuss the potential effects of the ESA scheme
on each area. A final report was then produced which shows how
changes due to the ESA scheme would be monitored over a ten
year period.

The examples to the right show some of the illustrations, which
were produced to give some indication of the effects of the
scheme on particular landscape types.

Scotland's Environmentally Sensitive Areas