Land Cover Map 2015
(LCM2015)

LCM2015 is a land cover map of the UK which was produced by the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology by classifying satellite images from 2014 and 2015 into 21 Broad Habitat-based classes.

LCM2015 consists of a vector product and a range of of raster products. The data sets are:

- Vector. This is the core LCM data set from which the other products are derived. It provides a number of attributes including land cover at the target class level, the number of pixels within the polygon classified as each land cover type and a probability value provided by the classification algorithm.

- 25m raster. This is the most detailed raster product. The 25m raster product consists of two bands: band 1 is the raster representation of the majority (dominant) class per-polygon for the 21 target classes. Band 2 is the mean per polygon probability as reported by the Random Forest classifier.

- 1km percentage cover raster. 1km percentage products provide the percentage cover for each land cover class for 1km x 1km pixels. The products contain one band per class and are available at two levels of thematic resolution; the 21 target classes (producing a 21 band image) and the 10 aggregate classes (producing a 10 band image).

- 1km dominant cover raster. The 1km dominant coverage products are based on the 1km percentage products and report the class with the highest percentage cover for each 1km x 1km pixel. The 1km dominant cover products are produced for both the 21 target classes and the 10 aggregate classes.

For the 1km datasets, as well as the TARGET class data, a 10-class AGGREGATE level dataset is also available. This groups some of the more specialised classes into more general categories (for example, five coastal classes in the target dataset are grouped into a single aggregate coastal class). Further details about the products are available in the documentation that accompanies each dataset.

These are one of a series of land cover maps, produced by UKCEH since 1990. They include versions in 1990, 2000, 2007, 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2019.