Land Cover Map 2020 (land parcels, N. Ireland)

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https://doi.org/10.5285/36343ace-d56a-43ea-9d48-2f434dafcb26

This is the land parcel (polygon) dataset for the UKCEH Land Cover Map of 2020 (LCM2020) representing Northern Ireland. It describes Northern Ireland's land cover in 2020 using UKCEH Land Cover Classes, which are based on UK Biodiversity Action Plan broad habitats. A range of land parcel attributes are provided. These include the dominant UKCEH Land Cover Class given as an integer value and a range of per-parcel pixel statistics to help assess classification confidence and accuracy; for a full explanation please refer to the dataset documentation accompanying this dataset.

LCM2020 represents a suite of geospatial land cover datasets (raster and polygon) describing the UK land surface in 2020. These were produced at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology by classifying satellite images from 2020. These are one of a series of UKCEH land cover maps, which began with the 1990 Land Cover Map of Great Britain (now usually referred to as LCM1990) followed by UK-wide land cover maps in 2000, 2007, 2015 and annually since 2017.

This work was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council award number NE/R016429/1 as part of the UK-SCAPE programme delivering National Capability.

Publication date: 2022-07-12

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More information

View numbers valid from 01 June 2023 Download numbers valid from 12 July 2022 (information prior to this was not collected)

Format

Spatiallite

Spatial information

Study area

Spatial representation type

Vector

Spatial reference system

Irish Grid

Temporal information

Temporal extent

2020-01-01 to 2020-12-31

Provenance & quality

UKCEH's automated land cover algorithms generated 10m classified pixels from Sentinel-2 satellite data. Training data were automatically selected from stable land covers over the interval of 2017 to 2019. A Random Forest classifier used these to classify four composite images representing per season median surface reflectance. Seasonal images were integrated with context layers (e.g., height, aspect, slope, coastal proximity, urban proximity and so forth) to reduce confusion among classes with similar spectra.

Land cover was validated by organising the pixel classification into a land parcel spatial framework (the LCM2020 Classified Land Parcels product). The classified land parcels were compared to known land cover producing confusion matrix to determine overall and per class accuracy. Details are available from the product documentation.

This product represents the LCM2020 Classified Land Parcel, Northern Ireland.

Licensing and constraints

Bespoke licensing conditions apply to these data. If you choose to download the data, the UKCEH Data Licensing team will contact you to negotiate a licence.

Cite this dataset as:

Morton, R.D.; Marston, C.G.; O'Neil, A.W.; Rowland, C.S. (2022). Land Cover Map 2020 (land parcels, N. Ireland). NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre. https://doi.org/10.5285/36343ace-d56a-43ea-9d48-2f434dafcb26

BibTeX RIS

This dataset is included in the following collections

Land Cover Map 2020

Citations

Marston, C.G., O'Neil, A.W., Morton, R.D., Wood, C.M., & Rowland, C.S. (2023). LCM2021 – the UK Land Cover Map 2021. In Earth System Science Data (Vol. 15, Issue 10, pp. 4631–4649). Copernicus GmbH. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-4631-2023