Site conditions: the ground the checks judge against

Several of the planting checks ask whether a species suits this site, not just whether it suits the spot it was drawn in. To answer that they need to know something about the ground and the climate. Site conditions is where you record it.

Open it with ✅ Checks ▸ 🌱 Site conditions in the palette, or 🌱 Site conditions in the sidebar's 11 · Analysis & Simulation: either opens the checks panel with Site conditions unfolded. On an event site the same two entries read ⛰️ Site conditions and show the event's own flood zones, ground conditions and typical weather with their sources instead — see Site conditions: flood, ground and weather. An event site's checks panel has no soil box: no event check reads these values.

The five values

Looking the soil up

Look up soil queries the British Geological Survey's Soil Parent Material Model at 1 km resolution for your site, and fills in the texture for you. It reports its own confidence and quotes the soil group it read, so you can see what the call was based on.

Three things to know about that answer, all of which the panel tells you:

• It describes the parent material — what the soil forms in, roughly to 2–3 m — not the topsoil, at a 1 km grid. It is a desk-study starting point and never a substitute for a site investigation.
• It carries no pH reading. It can say the ground leans alkaline or acid, and the panel shows that, but a direction is not a number, so nothing is written into the pH field.
• It carries no shrink-swell rating, so whether this is shrinkable clay is still a question for you — and it is the one the foundation check depends on. Take it from a soil report.

The dataset covers Great Britain only. Outside it — including Northern Ireland and offshore — the lookup says so rather than guessing. It needs a map view loaded, because it has to know where the site is, and it uses the centre of your boundary once one is closed.

What happens when a value is blank

The checks that depend on a value stay silent rather than guess at it. A "wrong species for this soil" finding invented out of no soil data would be worse than saying nothing. Each check tests its own field, so recording only the pH still gets you the pH check and nothing else.

The review does not go quiet about it, though: where a scheme has planting and no conditions recorded, it adds an information finding saying so in as many words, so an unchecked scheme is never mistaken for a clean one.