Environment Systems is a preferred supplier of ecological mapping for coastal monitoring frameworks in England and is currently working on the North West framework for Sefton Council. The extent of the area to be mapped runs from the Solway Firth to the River Dee.

Habitat mapping is being undertaken to provide freely available coastal and terrestrial habitat extent data for use by Local Authorities, the Environment Agency, Natural England (NE) and stakeholders. This will contribute to their high level reporting and monitoring requirements for Natura 2000 sites, Biodiversity Action Plans, and Sites of Special Scientific Interest.

Project objectives:

  • Map the extent of all coastal and terrestrial habitats to both IHS and Phase 1 classifications
  • Undertake ground truthing
  • Map the extent of all coastal and terrestrial Phase 1 habitats within the set area
  • Carry out an accuracy assessment of the habitat layers

The majority of the work involves the use of LiDAR and Aerial Photography which is pre- processed and mosaicked prior to the development of a number of rule bases, where segmentation and classification of the major land cover classes is carried out.

Part of the project work includes developing alternatives to Ordnance Survey MasterMap base mapping. This would enable anyone to access the habitat maps without the need for an Ordnance Survey license. The investigation included OS OpenData, specifically VectorMap District, and Open Street Map (OSM). Using aerial photography, much of what was ‘missing’ from Open Street Map, which is a crowdsourced dataset, was added manually. This will benefit not only users of the project data but the many thousands of regular OSM users.

As part of the project’s extensive quality assurance arrangements, ground surveys are being undertaken to validate the accuracy of the digital mapping output. These surveys focus on areas where priority habitats cannot be confidently identified from aerial photography alone. The project is due to be completed in February 2015. The data from the project will be made available at www.channelcoast.org