Environment Systems has provided one of four ‘experts’ for the external quality control of a project to create a Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS) for Turkey. The project has now reached a critical stage. A complete set of orthophotos has been provided for the whole of Turkey, forming a huge dataset of over 50,000 individual images and almost one petabyte of data.

A team of over 200 digitisers is working with the orthoimagery in a huge exercise to create a seamless geodatabase of reference parcels (agricultural blocks) covering the whole of Turkey’s agricultural surface and non-agricultural areas, in total almost 784K sq km. It is the single largest land cover digitising exercise in the whole of Europe.

Our man on the ground, Chris Finch, is working in a small External Quality Control team (EQC), whose role is to ensure that the data provided meets EU JRC criteria for the quality requirements for an LPIS. The work involves evaluating a sample of all reference parcels digitised across the whole of Turkey, including automatic, thematic and visual controls.

Turkey is a huge and agriculturally diverse country. There is a large arable and cereal sector (including rice and tobacco), major citrus fruit, wine and olive production, and with large areas of nut (hazelnut, walnut, almond and pistachio) and tea production. There are also extensive high biodiversity grasslands and forests. Mapping and classifying this diversity presents many challenges, especially within a limited timescale, and provides Environment Systems with a set of unique skills ideal for future land cover digitising projects anywhere in the world.