1930s Land utilisation mapping: an improved evidence-base for policy?

Mainly between 1931 and 1934, the Land Utilisation Survey of Great Britain recorded land use field by field for Great Britain. High resolution colour scans of all the LUSGB maps have already been created, mainly funded by the Environment Agency and DEFRA with unpublished Scottish sheets scanned more recently using a grant from a charity. From interviews with various agencies, some of whom have already made limited use of the LUSGB maps, there are a series of clear potential policy applications. “Supervised classification”, separately calibrated for each sheet, dealt effectively with colour variation. Applying successive filters, ‘focal majority’ and ‘nibble’, within our GIS software, removed much of the background clutter but some manual editing is still needed. A business case for vectorisation of land use data has been developed in collaboration with English Nature, English Heritage and the Countryside Agency, and with limited dialogue with Scottish Natural Heritage.