Land cover change in Scotland

Scotland from the 1940s to the 1980s

The National Countryside Monitoring Scheme
Visualisation and Analysis System

This CD-Rom has been produced as part of the National Countryside Monitoring Scheme (NCMS), a pioneering study to provide robust, quantitative data on changes in Scotland’s land cover. By interpreting and mapping aerial photography from around 1947, 1973 and 1988 for 467 representative locations throughout Scotland, the NCMS was able to estimate the extent of change between these years at a national and regional scale.

Through an ArcView ® interface, this CD-ROM provides full access to the NCMS dataset, allowing you to:

• examine land cover sequences within 467 sample squares
• estimate change within geographical areas.

Full details can be found in the user guide (560kb)

There are some examples of NCMS sample squares here.

Applications

• environmental reporting and local audit
• biodiversity assessment
• policy analysis
• land use research and land management planning
• secondary and tertiary education

System requirements

The application requires ArcView GIS 3.2 running within a Windows operating system. A minimum of a Pentium 200 processor and 64Mb of RAM is required. For optimal performance 650Mb of hard disk space is needed.

The CD-ROM can be ordered from SNH publications for £5.

For further information on the NCMS and the CD-ROM email ncms@snh.gov.uk

Some NCMS sample squares

Dyce.
The expansion of Dyce and Aberdeen Airport is illustrated (black). Kirkhill Forest to the west (darker-green) has expanded on heather moor (purple) and there are signs of intensification in the use of surrounding farmland: there is more arable farming (Yellow) in the late 1980s and hedgerows have been lost (dotted red lines).

Glen Isla.
The dots of black in the south of the square are Kirkton of Glen Isla. In the east, plantation forest has appeared by the 1970s (dark-green). Changing land management has resulted in the heather moorland in the north (purple) becoming grassier by the early 1970s (pale green). This rough grassland had been largely improved by the late 1980s (darker green).