Section 16 Land Use and Cover Area Frame Survey

The Land Use and Cover Area Frame Survey (LUCAS) is point database of direct observations throughout the EU every three years from 2006 and classifies observations into a Land Use (LU) and Land Cover (LC). Across the EU, around 350,000 points were surveyed in 2018, either by person (~70 %) or by interpretation of photos (~30 %). The points are selected via stratification of roughly 1 million locations in Europe that lie on a 2 x 2-km grid. The data also includes soil data at roughly 10 % of surveyed locations. The classification is derived for not only the point location but also for the land in the surrounding 20 metres. The classification of the data is hierarchical; this incorporates differing levels of detail starting at a set of broad classes. For LC, there are 8 main categories that are further divided to 83 sub-classes. For LU, there are 14 main categories that are further divided to 33 sub-classes. In total, there are roughly 17,000 points across the UK in the LUCAS dataset. The classification system is comparable to that of FAO and CORINE.

The data have been obtained but need some further time to process and analyse, as their use requires an understanding of the data structure and sampling design for proper interpretation. Despite the large number of points, a very small area appears to be represented (only 20 metres around each point), and which of these is actually from a ground survey remains unclear, so quite how this can be interpreted is still open to discussion. We anticipate the data will be of some use in the future, but are not used in the current analysis.