Great Britain Land Cover Change Raster 1990 to 2015

25-meter resolution raster data maps land cover change across Great Britain over a 25-year period. The product contains five bands detailing simplified land cover classes for 1990 and 2015, a binary change indicator, and 'change from' and 'change to' classifications. It was produced by the Environmental Information Data Centre under the UK-SCAPE programme.

Use Cases

• Train a segmentation model on the binary change layer (Band 3) to automatically detect areas of land cover transition.
• Analyze the 'change from' (Band 4) and 'change to' (Band 5) classes to quantify shifts between specific land cover types like urban expansion or agricultural conversion.
• Compare the 1990 (Band 1) and 2015 (Band 2) simplified class rasters to assess long-term environmental trends at a 25m spatial resolution.

Strengths

• Provides a direct 25-year comparison (1990-2015) of land cover across Great Britain.
• Includes five structured raster bands that explicitly encode change detection and classification.
• Data is produced at a consistent 25-meter spatial resolution for detailed analysis.

Limitations

• Land cover is simplified into only six classes, which may lack granularity for detailed ecological studies.
• The raster format and 25m resolution may not be suitable for analyzing very fine-scale changes at the parcel level.

Provenance

Source

Environmental Information Data Centre, derived from Land Cover Map (LCM) 1990 and 2015 rasters.

Collection Method

Produced by comparing the LCM1990 and LCM2015 25m raster versions to report change in six simplified classes.

Time Range

1990 to 2015

Freshness

Last updated in March 2026, though the underlying temporal coverage ends in 2015.

Geography

Great Britain