County Geology Site Criteria for Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly

4. The Local Sites Partnership will meet to evaluate sitesby referring to the completed protocol form and thesecriteria. Sites will be approved, rejected or put on holdpending more information.5. If the site is approved, site documentation willbe completed with a Site Summary Sheet and a SiteBoundary Map being produced for each site.The process for changes to site boundaries and/ordeletion of sites will follow the steps below (data islikely to have been collected by geologists undertakingsurveys in the field, so there is no need for steps 1 & 2above):1. Geologists will collate detailed information on thesite and reasons for suggested boundary changes andcomplete the form ‘Protocol for amending CountyGeology Site boundaries’ (currently in draft form;Appendix 4).2. The Local Sites Partnership will meet to evaluate theproposed amendment/deletion by referring to thecompleted protocol form and these criteria. Sites willbe approved, rejected or put on hold pending moreinformation.3. If the amendment/deletion is approved, sitedocumentation will be completed with a Site SummarySheet and a Site Boundary Map being produced foreach site.The summary sheet will be distributed to the site ownerand other selected parties and will ultimately be madeavailable on a password-protected web-based system.An example of the summary sheet is given in Appendix3. The web-based CGS dataset will be re-issuedannually. There will also be a rolling programme of sitereview and update, as funding allows.3.6 Site BoundariesThere are many issues associated with delineating sitesand drawing boundaries. Paragraphs A-D below outlinethe procedures associated with these.There are relatively few sites where the boundary whichmarks the land of interest from the wider landscape isclear-cut. While quarries are often features that can beclearly identified, the majority of exposures tend to besporadic and interspersed with areas of semi-naturalvegetation and farmland.In these cases the boundaries that are drawn to encloseand define a site of Earth science interest necessarilyinvolve some element of subjectivity. It is usually thecase that the areas of Earth science interest are firstidentified and then a boundary is defined that bothincludes all the area of interest and follows some clearlyidentifiable landscape feature.B Extensive features that are fragmented maystill be viewed as one site. For example a dyke withintermittent exposure. In circumstances such as theseit is deemed sensible to treat the whole area as onesite, even though some of the components are isolatedand small. There is no easy answer to how fragmentedany area must be before the fragments are treated asseparate sites, rather each case must be assessed anddescribed on an individual basis.C As a general rule site boundaries do notinclude deliberately delineated buffer zones. Bufferland is defined as land that of itself is of no evidentsignificant Earth science interest, but changes to itmay have a knock-on effect to adjacent sites of Earthscience importance. For example, an active processesgeomorphological site.D The problem of whether areas within a site thatlack special interest should be excluded from the site,thereby leaving ‘holes’ within the site map, has to bedecided for each case on its merits. There are twobasic types of site where this problem arises: it maybe the case that there is intermittent or fragmentedexposure of a feature or a site may have several featuresof interest that have been incorporated into one site butexposure is not continuous. The size of the includedarea is of secondary importance but should ideally be arelatively small proportion of the total area of the site.A Site boundaries are drawn as close to thegeological site interest as possible, whilst also beingclearly identifiable on the ground. In practice,this usually means that the boundary of any site iscoincident with parts of the local field boundary systemor edges of clearly identifiable landscape features suchas quarries. It is also important to document the siteinterest using photographs, so it can be easily identified.Occasionally, if it is important to accurately locate asite's interest, it may need professional surveying.County Geology Site Criteria for Cornwall & The Isles of ScillyPage 8