OS Enhanced Land Cover (ELC) Beta is a foundational dataset combining topography and land cover from the OS National Geographic Database, OS aerial imagery and OS terrain 5 with a range of third-party open habitat data. This includes information from Natural England鈥檚 Living England, the Rural Payments Agency鈥檚 Crop Map of England and UKHab鈥檚 classification system. UKHab is the UK standard classification for referring to habitats and underpins the statutory biodiversity metric which developers must use.
The product can be used to conduct BNG assessments, both for early workflow desktop analysis and for use by ecologists in the field. Developers, landowners, and ecologists can also better understand the composition of their land cover at scale before conducting more detailed surveys. For example, Wessex Water has used OS ELC data to understand the biodiversity of hundreds of sites in one spatial picture and apply this data to their 30-year projections for BNG.
Linckia, one of a recent Geovation Accelerator cohort, is the partner that takes OS ELC data and serves it to Wessex Water via their Habitat Fabric dataset and BNG application.
Co-founder Luke Chittock said, 鈥淲e really like OS Enhanced Land Cover, which we integrate into Linckia's BNG solution on the ESRI platform. It gives us a scalable, authoritative, and auditable approach that we can trust, delivering better outcomes for our customers. Applying our ecology expertise to the data to create Habitat Fabric, we have seen a 40% reduction in data processing costs from earlier approaches, rising to 90% reduction when compared to processing imagery for the same outcomes.鈥�
Dr Jack Parkin, product manager for the built and natural environment at OS, said, 鈥淭he Government鈥檚 home-building target, combined with Defra鈥檚 BNG legislation, has made a market condition where ecologists are in high demand. One of the benefits of OS Enhanced Land Cover is to boost the productivity of those ecologists and to make their time count. We aggregate multiple geospatial datasets together to provide a provisional assessment of habitats on the ground which saves ecologists time both in desktop analysis and pre-screening in the field. This can shave days, or even weeks, from development times, and with 1.5 million homes in the pipeline, that could really add up.鈥�
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