LCM2007: UK Land Cover Percentages by Broad Habitat

Land Cover Map 2007 (LCM2007) is a 1km resolution raster dataset produced by the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology for Great Britain. It consists of 23 bands, each representing a percentage cover value for a Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) Broad Habitat class. The map updates earlier versions from 1990 and 2000, derived from a computer classification of Landsat, IRS, and SPOT satellite imagery.

Use Cases

• Analyzing habitat composition and fragmentation across Great Britain based on the 23 Broad Habitat classes.
• Modeling ecological connectivity or species distribution using percentage land cover values per 1km pixel.
• Assessing land-use change by comparing the 2007 snapshot with earlier LCM1990 and LCM2000 products.
• Informing conservation policy and land management decisions with spatially explicit habitat data.

Strengths

• Provides a consistent, UK-wide classification based on the standardized JNCC Broad Habitats framework.
• Updates and upgrades two previous national land cover maps (LCMGB 1990 and LCM2000), enabling time-series analysis.
• Derived from multiple satellite sensors (Landsat, IRS, SPOT) and ancillary data, likely improving classification accuracy.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as row count, file size, license, and specific column names are missing from all platform entries.
• The dataset's spatial resolution (1km) may be too coarse for local-scale or parcel-level analysis.
• The 'last updated' metadata field shows a future date (2026-04-02), indicating potential platform ingestion errors.

Provenance

Source

Centre for Ecology & Hydrology

Collection Method

Computer classification of satellite scenes (mainly Landsat, IRS, SPOT) incorporating ancillary datasets.

Time Range

2007

Freshness

2026-04-02 08:44:12.473649 (Note: This is a future date, likely a platform artifact)

Geography

Great Britain / United Kingdom