Twenty-five land cover classes, including built-up areas and semi-natural vegetation, are mapped across Great Britain using a 25-meter raster grid. The map is derived from cloud-free Landsat Thematic Mapper satellite imagery. The dataset was produced by the organization SCIOPS.
Use Cases
- Analyze land use change by tracking shifts between the 25 cover types, such as arable farmland to built-up areas.
- Model habitat connectivity for conservation planning using the spatial distribution of forestry and semi-natural vegetation classes.
- Integrate land cover raster data with other geospatial layers like soil or climate data for environmental decision support systems.
- Assess urban expansion by quantifying the extent and location of the built-up areas class over time.
- Support agricultural policy by characterizing the distribution of pasture and arable farmland cover types.
Strengths
- Provides 25 distinct land cover classes, including subdivided upland and lowland variants.
- Offers complete coverage of the land surface of Great Britain.
- Data can be summarized at multiple resolutions, such as 1 km squares.
Limitations
- The original satellite imagery source and specific temporal coverage are not stated.
- The dataset's resolution is fixed at 25 meters, which may be too coarse for detailed parcel-level analysis.
- Without update information, the map may represent a historical snapshot rather than current conditions.
Provenance
- Source
- SCIOPS, using American Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) satellite imagery.
- Collection Method
- Digital map derived from classification of cloud-free satellite images.
- Time Range
- null
- Freshness
- null
- Geography
- Great Britain (complete land surface).