Land cover and vegetation data from an ecological survey of `key habitat' landscapes in England, 1992-93.

Since 1978, a series of national surveys (Countryside Surveys) have been carried out by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (formerly the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology) to gather data on the natural environment in Great Britain. As the sampling framework for these surveys is not optimised to yield data on rarer or more specialised habitats, a survey was commissioned by the then Department of the Environment (DOE, now the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs, DEFRA), in the 1990s to carry out additional survey work in English landscapes which contained semi-natural habitats that were perceived to be under threat, or which represented areas of concern to the Ministry. The landscapes were: lowland heath, chalk and limestone grasslands, coasts and uplands. These landscapes were chosen from a list identified as 'key habitats' in the Countryside Stewardship Scheme, an agri-environment scheme initiated in 1991. The survey design was a series of gridded, stratified, randomly selected 1 km squares taken as representative of classes derived from environmental classifications (or spatial masks) for each of the four landscape types in England determined from a statistical land classification. This resulted in a total of 213 of these squares being surveyed in the summers of 1992 and 1993, with information being collected regarding vegetation species, land cover, landscape features and land use. Data from the survey were collected using standardised, repeatable methods, with the database now providing a valuable baseline against which future ecological changes, resulting from a range of different drivers, may be compared. Following the surveys, the data were analysed and described in a series of contract reports showing that valuable habitats were restricted in all landscapes and that the majority were within designated land. The data set provides major potential for analyses, beyond those published in the reports published in 1996, for example in relation to climate change, agri-environment policies and land management. Precise locations of the plots are restricted, largely for reasons of landowner confidentiality. However, the representative nature of the data set makes it highly valuable for evaluating the status of the associated landscapes and vegetation covered. Both land cover data and vegetation plot data were collected during the surveys in 1992 and 1993, and are available via the following DOI: https://doi.org/10.5285/7aefe6aa-0760-4b6d-9473-fad8b960abd4. The spatial masks are also available from: https://doi.org/10.5285/dc583be3-3649-4df6-b67e-b0f40b4ec895. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]