Linking ecological information recorded from ground, air and space: examples from Countryside Survey 1990

The Countryside Survey 1990 has produced an assessment of the land cover and flora of Great Britain. Three different techniques were adopted for collecting information, namely field survey and the analysis of aerial photography and satellite imagery. The project aimed to integrate the different strengths of the three systems to provide specific details of landscape structure and patterns, and a synoptic overview of Great Britain. Two key elements which allowed the systems to be linked are the ITE Land Classification and Geographical Information Systems (GIS). The Land Classification, structured around the Ordnance Survey (OS) National Grid at 1 km resolution, subdivides Great Britain into thirty-two biogeographic strata allowing data collected on the ground to be aggregated for different regions. GIS are used in the production of land cover maps and statistics for sampled areas. The satellite Land Cover Map (LCM) can be expressed using the same projection and scale so that the information can be combined. A Countryside Information System (CIS) has been developed to present and overlay sampled and census data. The CIS handles censused data registered to the National Grid and data sampled using the ITE Land Classification as a stratification. The paper discusses the methods and advantages of combining data from different sources.