Land Cover Map 2015

(LCM2015)

Clare Rowland, Dan Morton, Luis Carrasco, Nye O’Neil, Claire Wood

Five questions:

• What is the Land Cover Map (LCM)?

• Why is LCM important?

• How is a LCM produced?

• What LCM products are there?

• How has the LCM been used?

What is the Land Cover Map?

Land Cover Statistics

Land cover class ENGLAND SCOTLAND WALES NORTHERN_IRELAND

Broadleaved woodland 7.5 4.0 7.9 3.3

Coniferous woodland 2.3 13.0 7.7 5.2

Arable 36.5 8.6 4.8 6.8

Improved grassland 32.8 17.3 47.3 57.3

Neutral grassland 0.5 0.0 0.5 3.0

Calcareous grassland 0.6 0.0 0.1 0.0

Acid grassland 3.6 15.3 19.9 2.8

Fen 0.1 0.0 0.2 0.0

Heather 1.3 9.2 2.0 1.9

Heather grassland 0.7 17.1 1.1 4.4

Bog 1.5 8.2 1.3 6.5

Inland rock 0.2 1.9 0.3 0.2

Saltwater 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1

Freshwater 0.7 2.0 0.6 4.2

Supra-littoral rock 0.0 0.2 0.2 0.0

Supra-littoral sediment 0.1 0.3 0.5 0.3

Littoral rock 0.0 0.2 0.0 0.0

Littoral sediment 0.1 0.2 0.1 0.1

Saltmarsh 0.3 0.1 0.5 0.0

Urban 2.6 0.5 0.9 0.6

Suburban 8.3 1.8 4.2 3.5

Land Cover Statistics

Land cover class ENGLAND SCOTLAND WALES NORTHERN IRELAND

Broadleaved woodland 7.5 4.0 7.9 3.3

Coniferous woodland 2.3 13.0 7.7 5.2

Arable 36.5 8.6 4.8 6.8

Improved grassland 32.8 17.3 47.3 57.3

Acid grassland 3.6 15.3 19.9 2.8

Heather 1.3 9.2 2.0 1.9

Heather grassland 0.7 17.1 1.1 4.4

Bog 1.5 8.2 1.3 6.5

Urban & Suburban 10.9 2.3 5.0 4.1

What is the Land Cover Map?

Land Cover Map 2015

(LCM2015)

• ~ 7.5 million land parcels

• 21 Land cover classes

• Input data: Landsat-type (~25m

optical)

• Based on image classification

• Classify summer-winter

composite images

• LCM2015 fourth in a series

Land cover map series

• 25 years of Land Cover Mapping

Brief history of UK Land Cover Mapping

LCM1990 (formerly LCMGB) LCM2000 LCM2007

25m Pixels Segments Parcels

LCM2000 ~ 6 million segment-based polygons

LCM2007 ~ 10 million parcel-based polygons

Why is LCM important?

Atmosphere & climate Agriculture

Health & hazards

Impact assessment

Ecology & conservation

Marine & coastal

Water & catchments

Education & publicity

Statistics, information

Urban studies

Telecommunications

Landscape planning

Supports a wide range of applications:

Seasonal nectar productivity in Great Britain

M Baude et al. Nature 530, 85–88 (2016)

doi:10.1038/nature16532

Based on LCM2007 and data on nectar availability through the year

Why is LCM important?

• Widely used by Academia, Commercial users, Government, NGOs

• Recent users include, Norfolk Rivers Trust, Severn Trent Water and a consortium including OFCOM and Microsoft

• Over 18,000 downloads of the various LCM data sets from the CEH Information Gateway over last 2 years, by over 580 unique users

Table 2: Number of unique users downloading LCM data from the CEH Information Gateway (July 2012 – Nov.

2014)Table 1: LCM usage licensed by CEH Knowledge Transfer

Academic Commercial Government,NGOs

LCM20071 157 38 64

LCM2000 316 192 70

LCM1990 620 132 88

1 Vector & 25m raster products only.

1km products only available via CIG.

1km products

25m raster & vector

LCM2007 301 279

LCM2000 197 0

LCM1990 71 0

Why is LCM important?

Educating young minds

LCM2007 now features in a GCSE textbook!

How is a Land Cover map produced?

1. Get the data

2. Prepare data

3. Classify the data

Input data: spectral data

Summer image (June 10th, path 204)

Winter image (March 12th, path 203)

Both images:• Landsat-8• Atmospheric + topographic

correction applied• Cloud maskedDisplayed as: RGB as NIR, SWIR, Red

Input data: composite extent

Common extent

Winterimage

Summer image

Input data: final composite

Summer & Winter data

Plus, additional data

DEMAspect

Slope

Plus, distance from sea, buildings, rivers and coast

How is a Land Cover map produced?

1. Get the data

2. Prepare data

3. Classify the data

How is a Land Cover map produced?

1. Get the data

2. Prepare data

3. Classify the data

Using new methods:1. New classification algorithm2. Harvesting training areas from existing LCMs

How is a Land Cover Map produced?

1. Get the data

2. Prepare data

3. Classify the data

Using new methods:1. New classification algorithm2. Harvesting training areas from existing LCMs

Advantages of these methods:1. Reduction of manual input2. Increased speed, leading to more frequent UK LCMs3. Raises potential of re-classifying LCM1990 and LCM2000 to common format

What LCM products are there?

What do they look like?

Comparison of the level of spatial detail in the different productsTop images approx. 35km x 35km Lower images approx. 6km x 6km

Vector attributes

Attribute Description

gid Unique parcel identifier (geometry identifier) for each parcel.

BHAB Dominant land cover at Broad Habitat level e.g. Improved grassland

Pix_dist Number of pixels of each class within the polygon

unc Uncertainty – mean per polygon probability from Random Forest, scaled between 0-255

Unc_stdev Standard deviation of the uncertainty.

npix Number of pixels in polygon

Modal_class

RECOMMENDED FOR DISPLAY. This attribute gives the LCM2015 class as an integer code from

1-21 (see Table 2). Note this is often referred to as the LCM2015 target class (see Appendix 3

for standard LCM colour mapping).

Modal_prop Proportion of polygon classified as dominant class

CompositeThe number of the composite image that the classification is derived from; 99 signifies infill

from LCM2007 (see Appendix 4 for details of composite images).

What do they look like?

1km percentage cover products

LCM2015

LCM2015

Central London

Further info….

Websites:

https://eip.ceh.ac.uk/lcm/LCM2015

https://www.ceh.ac.uk/services/land-cover-map-2015

[Google CEH LCM2015]

LCM2015 Data set document (available via website)

Note all LCM2015 data sets have doi’s.

LCM uses…

LCM uses…