Living England 2022-23 (LE22-23) is a satellite-derived national habitat map showing the extent and distribution of England’s broad habitats, aligned to the UK Biodiversity Action Plan (UKBAP) habitat classification framework. LE22-23 is the first publication using a standardised workflow, intended for future iterations informed by updated satellite imagery and habitat ground data, enabling future assessments of habitat change.
The LE22-23 habitat map has been developed using satellite imagery, environmental datasets and machine learning techniques, informed by national-scale field data collection. Living England (LE) uses a bespoke spatial framework derived from seasonal imagery mosaics and an object-based image classification approach to map habitats.
In comparison to the earlier LE Phase IV dataset (published in 2022), LE22-23 provides additional features including a novel reliability metric indicating the confidence in the habitat assignment for each segment, and the mapping of Solar Farms (0.1% of England’s land cover). LE22-23 reports an overall accuracy for modelled habitats of 87%; however, this varies between classes and regions across England.
This technical user guide summarises the data and methodologies used to create LE22-23 and highlights how the data attributes should be interpreted to inform use of this dataset. This guide accompanies the data release under an Open Government Licence (OGL).
The supplementary material ‘NERR141 Living England 2022-23 – Supplementary material – Confusion Matrices.xlsx’ provides evaluation assessments of the classification model used to predict habitat classes in the LE22-23 habitat map. These statistics are broken down for each habitat class and biogeographic zone.
The Living England 2022-23 Habitat Map is available on the Natural England Open Data Geoportal.