The government has saved £700,000 by using
geographic information software on mobile computers to produce
the most detailed
Countryside
Survey to date.
The fifth survey since 1978 was commissioned by environmental
affairs department
(Defra) and the Natural Environment Research Council
(NERC).
Alan Thorpe, chief executive of NERC, said the survey provides
vital scientific evidence for policymakers and stakeholders in
sustainable land management.
The savings were achieved by halving the time taken to capture
the data for the latest Countryside Survey report for England,
Scotland and Wales published in London today.
Surveyors from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) used
GPS equipment in the field to capture location data and entered it
directly into the geographic information system (GIS) from ESRI
(UK).
John Watkins, section head at the CEH, said this meant data was
available within the central database on the same day as the survey
was carried out.
"We believe this year's Countryside Survey provides the most
accurate picture yet of our changing landscape thanks to the
improvements in data collection and analysis," he said.
The software also reduced the time needed to prepare the data
for analysis by enforcing data quality rules at the point of
capture in the field.
In past surveys, the CEH used paper maps and recording sheets to
capture landscape features and their attributes. A team of ten
digitisers then took two years to prepare the data for
analysis.
The process was slow and prone to error due to the number of
manual transformations and edits required to link the data
together, said Watkins.
The Countryside Survey shows how the main features of the
countryside have changed, how numbers of plant species have
responded to changing land use, how habitat quality and vegetation
condition has altered for key habitats, and how soils are
recovering from acid pollutants.