Living England Percentage Cover by LSOA

This is the data associated with the paper submitted entitled:

A Novel Approach for Mapping Exposure to Land Cover at the Small Statistical Geography Level

Joanne K. Garrett¹, Lewis R. Elliott¹, Rebecca Lovell¹, Benedict W. Wheeler¹, Tom Marshall², Fränze Kibowski², Benjamin B. Philips³, Kevin J. Gaston³

This dataset includes the Living England percentage land cover at the LSOA level calculated by two methods. These methods are referred to as the "proposed" method and the "typical" method. Our proposed method uses data at both LSOA and postcode (sub-LSOA) levels for England, first calculating the percentage coverage of land cover types within 300 m postcode buffers, then averaging these at the LSOA level weighted by the number of domestic postal delivery addresses (as a proxy for population per postcode). It mitigates edge effects by allowing habitat exposure to extend beyond the LSOA boundary through the use of a 300-metre postcode buffer and maintains consistency across varying LSOA sizes. We argue that the new proposed approach reduces the potential for exposure misclassification associated with variable unit size at the small statistical geography level.

The variables are described in the included file data_variable_descriptions.xlsx

The code is available on Github at github.com/j-k-garrett/RENEW_mapping.

LSOAs were obtained for the year 2011 [1]. Postcode locations were obtained from the UK’s Ordnance Survey dataset of postcode locations (Codepoint; [2]), which is accessible through the Edina Digimap service for UK educational and research institutions. The Living England Habitat Map is a probability-based map showing the extent and distribution of broad habitats across England [3]. Estuaries and rias were obtained from the Coastal Physiographic features product from JNCC [4.5]. Boundary data for Scotland and Wales were obtained from the Ordnance Survey dataset Boundary-Line [6].

The study was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council ‘Renewing biodiversity through a people-in-nature approach (RENEW)’ project (NE/W004941/1) 

References

[1] Office for National Statistics: Lower Layer Super Output Areas (December 2011) Boundaries Full Clipped (BFC) EW V3. https://geoportal.statistics.gov.uk/datasets/1f23484eafea45f98485ef816e4fee2d_0/explore; 2021.

[2] Ordnance Survey: Code-Point. August 2021. EDINA Digimap Ordnance Survey Service; 2021.

[3]   Kilcoyne A, Clement M, Moore C, Picton Phillipps G, Keane R, Woodget A, Potter S, Stefaniak A, Trippier B: Living England: Technical User Guide. NERR108.  http://nepubprod.appspot.com/publication/4918342350798848; 2022: 38.

[4] Joint Nature Conservation Committee: Coastal Physiographic Features - Estuaries. https://www.data.gov.uk/dataset/225fb0e1-5cfd-43fa-a6bf-c108091f3825/coastal-physiographic-features-estuaries; 2018.

[5] Joint Nature Conservation Committee: Coastal Physiographic Features - Ria https://www.data.gov.uk/dataset/71bb8571-6214-45ba-8f14-a9b8d014b90c/coastal-physiographic-features-ria; 2018.

[6] Ordnance survey: Boundary-Line, Scotland and Wales region. 23rd April 2022 edn. https://digimap.edina.ac.uk/os: EDINA Digimap Ordnance Survey Service; 2022.