The Ancient Woodland Inventory identifies over 52,000 ancient woodland sites in England. Ancient woodland is identified using presence or absence of woods from old maps, information about the wood's name, shape, internal boundaries, location relative to other features, ground survey, and aerial photography. The information recorded about each wood and stored on the Inventory Database includes its grid reference, its area in hectares and how much is semi-natural or replanted. Guidance document can be found on our [Amazon Cloud Service](https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/data.defra.gov.uk/Natural_England/Habitat_Species/Habitats/Ancient_Woodland_England_NE/Ancient_Woodland_England_Docs.zip) Prior to the digitisation of the boundaries, only paper maps depicting each ancient wood at 1:50 000 scale were available. Full metadata can be viewed on [data.gov.uk](https://data.gov.uk/dataset/9461f463-c363-4309-ae77-fdcd7e9df7d3/ancient-woodlands-england).