Vegetated Shingle Habitat Map Derived from Airborne CASI and Lidar Data

A vegetated shingle habitat map polygon shapefile created by the Environment Agency. The map is derived from CASI multispectral data, Lidar elevation data, and ground data, using supervised classification with quantitative accuracy assessment via a confusion matrix. The product merges data from multiple sites across multiple years.

Use Cases

• Classifying coastal vegetated shingle habitats based on multispectral and elevation data.
• Training machine learning models for habitat mapping using supervised classification methods.
• Assessing the accuracy of remote sensing habitat classifications via confusion matrices.
• Analyzing habitat distribution across multiple sites and years.
• Integrating ground survey data with airborne imagery for environmental monitoring.

Strengths

• Derived from multiple data sources including CASI multispectral, Lidar elevation, and ground survey data.
• Includes a quantitative accuracy assessment performed using a confusion matrix.
• Final map improvements were checked using aerial photography captured simultaneously with the CASI data.

Limitations

• Ground data collection has temporal mismatch, occurring within a couple of months of CASI capture, potentially causing variations.
• Ground data spatial coverage may be incomplete, and a habitat class cannot be mapped if no samples were collected for it on site.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.

Provenance

Source

Environment Agency

Collection Method

Supervised classification using ground data to train the model, applied to CASI and Lidar data.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-24 13:14:36.067221; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Multiple sites across the UK (implied by uk_data platform).