Recent Land Cover Change - Recent Land Cover Change - Report for the Office for Environmental

For the final section of the report, the OEP requested commentary on the role of land use and landcover data for supporting and developing the Land Use Framework for England. [...] ceh.ac.uk 10 Recent Land Cover Change | Comparing the accuracy of LCM to the accuracy of national data sets produced in other countries is more complicated, because the challenges involved in land cover mapping vary from country to country, as do the classes required in the resulting classifications and the quality and quantity of the validation data. [...] LCM2015 is the earliest of the recent land cover maps (see Table 1 for details of the production timeline and method) and there were some issues that led to the under-estimation of Semi-natural grassland in and a slight over-estimate in the amount of Improved grassland. [...] For example, Defra used LCM data to understand the extent of semi-natural land in England (in the Biodiversity targets detailed evidence report8) and to capture the spatial configuration of land cover, during the developmental phase of the connectivity component of the D1 indicator9 (see also section 3.5 Recommendation on which data to use). [...] Accuracy – the key issue affecting whether a land cover data set can be used to map land cover change is the accuracy of the data set and the accuracy of key classes.