The Creation of a National Agricultural Land Use Dataset: Combining Pycnophylactic Interpolation with Dasymetric Mapping Techniques

Agricultural Census data is summarised over spatially course reporting units for reasons of farm confidentiality. This is problematic for research at a local level. This paper describes an approach combining dasymetric and volume preserving techniques to create a national land use dataset at 1km resolution. The results for an English county are compared with contemporaneous aggregated habitat data. The results show that the accurate estimates of local agricultural land use (Arable and Grass) patterns can be estimated when individual 1km squares are combined into blocks of >9 squares, thereby providing local estimates of agricultural land use. This in turn allow more detailed modelling of land uses related to specific livestock and cropping activities. The dataset created by this work has been subject to extensive external validation through its incorporation into a number of other national models: nitrate leaching (e.g. MAGPIE, NEAP-N), waste and pathogen modelling related to agricultural activity.