Land Cover Plus: national agricultural land cover information for the water industry

Anglian Water needs detailed, up to date and consistent information on cropping within its drinking water catchment to better understand catchment risks and to target mitigation measures with greater accuracy and efficiency. The forthcoming Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission is designed specifically to service operational applications, including agriculture, with much improved all-weather frequent repeat radar imagery. Land Cover Plus will investigate the feasibility of integrating such satellite data with the UK Land Cover Map, produced by CEH, to generate an annual agricultural land cover layer. To achieve this, RSAC Ltd will develop an innovative automated parcel-based crop classification technique based on temporal curve matching that is robust enough to cope with regional and temporal variations in crop phenology. Target customers for annual crop maps include all 22 UK water companies, agricultural suppliers and government agencies. There are also many possible overseas customers. RSAC and CEH will work together to develop the market for Land Cover Plus and formulate an appropriate business model for exploitation of project results.