Aylesbury, UK, July 19, 2007: This year’s Countryside Survey will provide the most complete picture yet of change to the UK’s natural environment. A new Geographic Information System (GIS) from ESRI (UK) which enables digital field mapping of landscape change will be used.
ESRI (UK), the market leader in enterprise GIS solutions, is the lead technology supplier for the Countryside Survey, which is an environmental audit of the UK countryside, measuring stock and change in habitats and landscape features. The Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) has carried out this audit every six to eight years since the late 1970s to support understanding and management of change in the countryside.
A field-based GIS data capture system customized by ESRI (UK) will be used by CEH field survey teams across the country to map changes and locate fixed vegetation plot using real-time GPS. The resulting geodatabase will integrate with software from SAS, the market leader in the new generation of business intelligence software and services, allowing detailed statistical analysis to be carried out producing a national picture of how the countryside has changed over the past 30 years. The results of the survey will be published in autumn 2008.
The new GIS is based on ESRI (UK)’s ArcGIS geodatabase and integrated with ArcGIS 9.2 desktop software on ruggedised laptop computers for use in the field. ESRI (UK) has also included a customized application of its software specific to the Countryside Survey to ensure quality of data. The information from the laptop is then downloaded to the central GIS database at CEH. This is linked to CEH’s statistical analysis via SAS software to produce a representative picture of the whole country.
ESRI’s GIS will improve the quality of data captured by reducing the time and effort required to process the information for analysis and by preserving and enforcing data quality rules at the point of capture in the field.
