This project comprised of a detailed survey of plant communities in semi-natural lowland grassland vegetation across Wales. The purpose of this data capture was to characterise the semi-natural lowland grassland vegetation of Wales and to provide a systematic conservation assessment of the sites surveyed. The survey locations and sites vary in size and complexity from small uniform hay-meadows of less than 1 ha, to extensive wet-dry pasture systems covering over 100 ha. The datasets which were produced from this project have been extensively validated and verified. However, the main limitation of these datasets is their age. Habitat composition may change over time due to successional trends, agricultural treatments or even planned developments, which means that there is no guarantee
that the information within these datasets is still representative on the ground today. However they do provide an important long-term catalogue of data which can be used to monitor changes to the grassland environments overtime. The dataset contributes to JNCC's UK Lowland Grassland Database, held by the Lowland Grassland Lead Co-ordination Network at EN in Peterborough.
The original Phase 2 Grassland Survey datasets (1987 – 2004) have now been put into a folder called Archive and the whole dataset has been updated with new and re-mapped sites. These now have the suffix 2020, and cover a time period 1989 – 2018.