Northern Ireland Land Cover Change Raster 1990-2015

A 25-meter resolution raster product maps land cover change across Northern Ireland between 1990 and 2015. The dataset contains five bands, including simplified land cover classes for each year, a binary change layer, and specific 'change from' and 'change to' classifications. It was produced by the Environmental Information Data Centre as part of the UK-SCAPE programme.

Use Cases

• Train a semantic segmentation model on the five-band raster to classify land cover transitions from 'change from' to 'change to' categories.
• Analyze the spatial distribution of the binary change layer (0/1) to identify regions of high landscape volatility over the 25-year period.
• Compare the simplified land cover classes in Band 1 (1990) and Band 2 (2015) to quantify shifts in categories like urban or agricultural land.
• Integrate the 25m resolution change data with other geospatial layers to model environmental drivers of land cover conversion.

Strengths

• Provides a direct comparison of land cover at two time points (1990 and 2015) over a 25-year span.
• Contains five specific data bands, including a binary change indicator and transition classes.
• Features a standardized 25-meter spatial resolution for consistent analysis across Northern Ireland.

Limitations

• Land cover is simplified into only six classes, which may lack detail for fine-grained ecological studies.
• The dataset is a static snapshot of change between two years, not a continuous time series.

Provenance

Source

Environmental Information Data Centre

Collection Method

Produced from the Land Cover Map (LCM) 25m raster versions of LCM1990 and LCM2015.

Time Range

1990 to 2015

Freshness

null

Geography

Northern Ireland