A CORINE map of Great Britain by automated means. Techniques for automatic generalization of the Land Cover Map of Great Britain

The European Commission (EC) programme ‘Co–ordination of Information on the Environment’ (CORINE) includes a project to map the land cover of member states. The CORINE map is essentially one which combines land cover and land use, giving 44 separate classes, in vector, displayed at a scale of 1:100000 with a minimum mappable unit of 25 ha. The Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (ITE) has compiled a digital land cover map of Great Britain (LCMGB) from classification of Landsat–TM data, resampled to a 25 m raster, with a minimum mappable unit of 0.125 ha and 25 cover types. This paper describes a pilot study which demonstrates the successful spatial generalisation with contextual interpretation to convert the LCMGB to CORINE specifications using semi–automated techniques within a GIS environment.