TRADITIONAL AND CURRENT PRACTICES 
IN THE ACQUISITION AND DISPLAY OF LAND COVER DATA IN BRITAIN 
The traditional practice for land cover mapping in Britain was 
established by Professor L. Dudley Stamp in the 1930s with the First 
Land Utilisation Survey of Britain (Stamp, 1931). This involved direct 
recording of land cover onto large scale maps during visual inspection 
in the field. Collations from these field maps were later generalized 
onto smaller scale maps (one inch to one mile) for publication. The 
areas occupied by different categories of land cover were measured from 
the maps using a simple planimeter. This was very labor intensive and 
slow—taking more than a decade to produce a national survey. 
The Second Land Use Survey of Britain, begun in the 1960s under Alice 
Coleman, essentially followed the method established by Stamp (Coleman, 
1961). The high cost of both the data acquisition by field survey and 
the data presentation in the form of printed color maps has inevitably 
resulted in a far from complete national land use survey. 
The first extensive use of aerial photography for the acquisition of 
land cover data in Britain was in the mapping of urban land cover of the 
developed areas of England and Wales by Fairey Surveys Ltd. for the 
Department of the Environment in 1975 (Van Genderen and Smith, 1976). 
Although 28 categories of urban land cover were deemed to be detectable, 
only 5 major categories were retained (residential, industrial/ 
commercial, educational/community, transport, and urban open space). 
One of the aims was to test the suitability of LANDSAT data for updating 
urban land cover; these five categories were believed to be compatible 
with the resolution of LANDSAT data. The feasibility of using LANDSAT 
for this purpose was investigated by the Atomic Energy Research 
Establishment at Harwell using their automated image analysis facility. 
The general conclusion of this work was that the ground resolution of 
LANDSAT (about 80m) was not yet good enough for regular monitoring of 
urban changes (Carter, 1979). 
Current land cover mapping projects include two which rely principally 
on LANDSAT data. The Macaulay Institute for Soil Research (in Aberdeen) 
has produced a land cover map at 1:100,000 scale of part of lowland 
Buchan for the Grampian Regional Council (Stove et al., 1981). Aberdeen 
University Geography Department is working on the production from 
LANDSAT data of a land cover map of Scotland at about 1:500,000 scale. 
Both of these projects involve the use of fairly powerful computer 
facilities for the handling and classification of the satellite data and 
require a considerable learning period before the data can be utilized 
successfully. 
From a consideration of current practices it was perceived that a gap 
exists between the traditional compilation of land cover/use maps in the 
field or from air photo interpretation and the semi-automated 
classification of land cover from LANDSAT data using a high-powered 
computer system. 
This has led to the development at Aberdeen University Geography 
Department of a procedure which combines the use of aerial photography 
and a low cost microcomputer system. The aerial photographic image is 
the basic data source and the microcomputer is used for storage and 
analysis of the image-derived data. 
GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF METHOD