What is in the website?

The map above is made up of only sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs). All of the 7,000 and more SSSIs of England, Scotland, Wales and areas of special scientific interest in Northern Ireland are shown in this web-app, in an interactive map.

The description of each site is also shown and can be searched for a word or phrase or animal or plant.
The site accounts give a good overview of the countries' more interesting wildlife areas and taken as a whole are a treasure trove of information.


Since the '70's and '80's, there has been a massive decline in the UK's biodiversity. This site aims to show the best of what there was and is across the length of the land.

How to use the website?

The simplest way to use the site is to go to "Search sites". This will offer "Site name" or "Word or term".

Site name allows you to search for a site by it's name or part name. Pressing search with no entry will give you all of the sites.

Word or term allows you to search all of the site descriptions and will identify the ones that mention your search term and place them on a map. Again a blank search term will return all of the sites.

Each site will be marked with a small green dot on the map. You can zoom in or out. Hovering over each will show its name and clicking it will bring up a popup which if clicked will take you to the detailed map. There are five thousand pages of text to look through, including thousands of species of organisms.

Clicking the links will take you to the site detail of a map on top and description below. The description will produce a species list, if appropriate with two links. the left one will search again for that species, the right one will search Google (to identify what it looks like)

The detailed map will show sites, as red dotted outlines, for 4 kilometres around the centre of the map. The centre of the map will be shown by a red bull's eye

Clicking the central bull's eye will initiate a search for the ten sites nearest it. When they show in the area below the map, the links will take you to them.

The small map in the bottom right can be collapsed if not needed, with the little arrow. It can be used to move around the big map quickly.

The arrow will take you to your location on the map, if you allow it so that you can see interesting nearby areas.

The Umbrella will fetch a weather forecast from the Met Office for the next five days, from the weather station nearest the centre of the map.