The Creation of a National Agricultural Land Use Dataset: Combining Pycnophylactic Interpolation with Dasymetric Mapping Techniques

Agricultural Census data is summarised over spatially coarse reporting units for reasons of farm confidentiality. This is problematic for research at a local level. This article describes an approach combining dasymetric and volume preserving techniques to create a national land use dataset at 1 km2 resolution. The results for an English county are compared with contemporaneous aggregated habitat data. The results show that the accurate estimates of local agricultural land use (Arable and Grass) patterns can be estimated when individual 1 km squares are combined into blocks of > 9 squares, thereby providing local estimates of agricultural land use. This in turn allows more detailed modelling of land uses related to specific livestock and cropping activities. The dataset created by this work has been subject to extensive external validation through its incorporation into a number of other national models: nitrate leaching (e.g. MAGPIE, NEAP-N), waste, and pathogen modelling related to agricultural activity.

[1]  Wolf-Dieter Rase,et al.  Volume-preserving interpolation of a smooth surface from polygon-related data , 2001, J. Geogr. Syst..

[2]  Peter F. Fisher,et al.  Integrating land-cover data with different ontologies: identifying change from inconsistency , 2004, Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci..

[3]  M. Langford,et al.  Generating and mapping population density surfaces within a geographical information system. , 1994, The Cartographic journal.

[4]  P. Kyriakidis.  A Geostatistical Framework for Area-to-Point Spatial Interpolation , 2004 .

[5]  P. Allanson.  Agricultural Land Use Change in England and Wales, 1892-1992 , 1996 .

[6]  A. Jones,et al.  The Land Cover Map of Great Britain: an automated classification of Landsat Thematic Mapper data , 1994 .

[7]  David A. Elston,et al.  Research Article: Estimating local variations in land use statistics , 2003, Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci..

[8]  Stéphane Dray,et al.  Multivariate Analysis of Incomplete Mapped Data , 2003, Trans. GIS.

[9]  Stan Openshaw,et al.  Modifiable Areal Unit Problem , 2008, Encyclopedia of GIS.

[10]  Roy Haines-Young,et al.  The Rural Data Infrastructure , 1996, Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci..

[11]  Mark W. Green,et al.  Areal interpolation and types of data , 1994 .

[12]  Navin Ramankutty,et al.  Geographic distribution of major crops across the world , 2004 .

[13]  Carol Morris,et al.  Towards a geography of agri-environmental policies in England and Wales , 1997 .

[14]  W. Tobler.  Smooth pycnophylactic interpolation for geographical regions. , 1979, Journal of the American Statistical Association.

[15]  Gary Higgs,et al.  Measuring Potential Access to Primary Healthcare Services: The Influence of Alternative Spatial Representations of Population , 2006 .

[16]  R. Bunce,et al.  Changes in the abundance of farmland birds in relation to the timing of agricultural intensification in England and Wales , 2000 .

[17]  A. Tatem,et al.  The accuracy of human population maps for public health application , 2005, Tropical medicine & international health : TM & IH.

[18]  Robin Flowerdew,et al.  Data integration: Statistical methods for transferring data between zonal systems , 1991 .

[19]  S. Anthony,et al.  Agricultural nitrogen balance and water quality in the UK , 2002 .

[20]  J. Mennis.  Generating Surface Models of Population Using Dasymetric Mapping , 2003, The Professional Geographer.

[21]  D. Rubin,et al.  Maximum likelihood from incomplete data via the EM - algorithm plus discussions on the paper , 1977 .

[22]  Steven G. Anthony,et al.  MAGPIE: A modelling framework for evaluating nitrate losses at national and catchment scales , 2000 .

[23]  N. J. Evans,et al.  The Pluriactivity, Part-Time Farming, and Farm Diversification Debate , 1993 .

[24]  Michael F. Goodchild,et al.  Areal interpolation: A variant of the traditional spatial problem , 1980 .

[25]  S. Anthony,et al.  Catchment scale modelling of nitrate leaching , 1996 .

[26]  M. Silgram,et al.  Intercomparison of national & IPCC methods for estimating N loss from agricultural land , 2001, Nutrient Cycling in Agroecosystems.

[27]  J. P. Howell,et al.  An Agricultural Atlas of England and Wales , 1929, Nature.

[28]  Critical drainage and nitrate leaching losses from manures applied to freely draining soils in Great Britain , 2003 .

[29]  A. Williams,et al.  Land use change and hydrological response in the Camel catchment, Cornwall , 2004 .

[30]  Charlotte Norman,et al.  Targeting agri-environmental policy , 1996 .

[31]  S. Anthony,et al.  Cost-effective means of reducing ammonia emissions from UK agriculture using the NARSES model , 2006 .

[32]  I. Gregory,et al.  Breaking the boundaries: geographical approaches to integrating 200 years of the census , 2005 .

[33]  Cynthia A. Brewer,et al.  Dasymetric Mapping and Areal Interpolation: Implementation and Evaluation , 2001 .

[34]  Michael F. Goodchild,et al.  A Framework for the Areal Interpolation of Socioeconomic Data , 1993 .

[35]  Nancy Vaughan,et al.  Habitat associations of European hares Lepus europaeus in England and Wales: implications for farmland management , 2003 .