The Access Network Map of England is a national composite dataset of Access layers, showing analysis of extent of Access provision for each Lower Super Output Area (LSOA), as a percentage or area coverage of access in England. The ‘Access Network Map’ was developed by Natural England to inform its work to improve opportunities for people to enjoy the natural environment. This map shows, across England, the relative abundance of accessible land in relation to where people live. Due to issues explained below, the map does not, and cannot, provide a definitive statement of where intervention is necessary. Rather, it should be used to identify areas of interest which require further exploration. Natural England believes that places where people can enjoy the natural environment should be improved and created where they are most wanted. Access Network Maps help support this work by providing means to assess the amount of accessible land available in relation to where people live. They combine all the available good quality data on access provision into a single dataset and relate this to population. This provides a common foundation for regional and national teams to use when targeting resources to improve public access to greenspace, or projects that rely on this resource. The Access Network Maps are compiled from the datasets available to Natural England which contain robust, nationally consistent data on land and routes that are normally available to the public and are free of charge. Datasets contained in the aggregated data:•
Agri-environment scheme permissive access (routes and open access)•
CROW access land (including registered common land and Section 16)•
Country Parks•
Cycleways (Sustrans Routes) including Local/Regional/National and Link Routes•
Doorstep Greens•
Local Nature Reserves•
Millennium Greens•
National Nature Reserves (accessible sites only)•
National Trails•
Public Rights of Way•
Forestry Commission ‘Woods for People’ data•
Village Greens – point data only Due to the quantity and complexity of data used, it is not possible to display clearly on a single map the precise boundary of accessible land for all areas. We therefore selected a unit which would be clearly visible at a variety of scales and calculated the total area (in hectares) of accessible land in each. The units we selected are ‘Lower Super Output Areas’ (LSOAs), which represent where approximately 1,500 people live based on postcode. To calculate the total area of accessible land for each we gave the linear routes a notional width of 3 metres so they could be measured in hectares. We then combined together all the datasets and calculated the total hectares of accessible land in each LSOA. For further information about this data see the following links:Access Network Mapping GuidanceAccess Network Mapping Metadata Full metadata can be viewed on data.gov.uk.

A selection of template maps

Under the Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment (NCEA) Pilot, Natural England and the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI) have been working in partnership to use BSBI's vast database of plant records to inform the evidence base for tree-planting activities. Poorly targeted tree planting risks damaging wildlife and carbon-rich habitats, therefore using these data we aim to ensure that areas of high conservation value are preserved in the landscape. The summarised botanical value map provides an easily interpretable output which categorises monads (1 x 1 km grid squares) as being of Low, Moderate or High botanical value according to the presence of Rare, Scarce and Threatened (RST) plant species and/or the proportion of Priority Habitat Positive Indicator (PHPI) species that were recorded within the 1 x 1 km grid square between 1970 and 2022. The PHPI species are a combination of BSBI axiophytes, positive indicators for common standards monitoring and ancient woodland indicators. The dataset includes an overall botanical value, as well as values based on only the presence of RST plant species, and a value for each broad habitat type based on the PHPI species records. By viewing the different attributes, you can gain insights into how valuable a monad is for different habitat types and for plant species of conservation concern, as well as an indication of how well a particular monad has been surveyed. The categories of 'No indicators, poor survey coverage' and 'No indicators, good survey coverage' indicate where no indicator species have been recorded and survey coverage either is above or below a threshold of 3 'recorder days'. A 'recorder day' is defined as being when 40 or more species have been recorded on a single visit and 3 recorder days is assumed sufficient to achieve good survey coverage within a 1 x 1 km grid square. This map is not intended to be used to carry out detailed assessments of individual site suitability for tree planting, for which the RST plant species heatmap at 100 x 100 m resolution and the PHPI heatmaps at 1 x 1 km resolution have been developed by BSBI and Natural England. However, the summarised botanical value map can provide useful insights at a strategic landscape scale, to highlight monads of high value for vascular plants and inform spatial planning and prioritisation, and other land management decision-making. These should be used alongside other environmental datasets and local knowledge to ensure decisions are supported by the appropriate evidence. Please get in contact if you have any queries about the data or appropriate uses at botanicalheatmaps@naturalengland.org.uk.Datasets used:BSBI botanical heatmap data - BSBIOS Grids - OSONS Country boundaries - ONSCommon Standards Monitoring guidance - JNCC 2004BSBI's Axiophyte list - Walker 2018Ancient Woodland Indicators - Glaves et al. 2009Plantatt - Hill et al. 2004Further information can be found in the technical report at:Botanical Heatmaps and the Botanical Value Map: Technical Report (NERR110)Full metadata can be viewed on data.gov.uk.

Anyone who has taught GIS using Census Data knows it is an invaluable data set for showing students how to take data stored in a table and join it to boundary data to transform this data into something that can be visualised and analysed spatially. Joins are a core GIS skill and need to be learnt, as not every data set is going to come neatly packaged as a shapefile or feature layer with all the data you need stored within. I don't know how many times I taught students to download data as a table from Nomis, load it into a GIS and then join that table data to the appropriate boundary data so they could produce choropleth maps to do some visual analysis, but it was a lot! Once students had gotten the hang of joins using census data they'd often ask why this data doesn't exist as a prepackaged feature layer with all the data they wanted within it. Well good news, now a lot off it is and it's accessible through the Living Atlas! Don't get me wrong I fully understand the importance of teaching students how to perform joins but once you have this understanding if you can access data that already contains all the information you need then you should be taking advantage of it to save you time. So in this exercise I am going to show you how to load English and Welsh Census Data from the 2021 Census into the ArcGIS Map Viewer from the Living Atlas and produce some choropleth maps to use to perform visual analysis without having to perform a single join.

I thought this would be simple, but there are many subtly different definitions of what a map is and I discovered i didn't really like all of them. After some time i settled on the following:The important thing to remember is that all maps are wrong. They have to be as they are generalisations.

1) Use the search tool to find where you go to school or work2) Measure the distance you travel to school or work

Our map currently looks overwhelming with too many layers thus making it difficult to understand. We can use cartographic tools to make it not only prettier but also easier to gain valuable information out of.

Statutory Main Rivers Map is a spatial (polyline) dataset that defines statutory watercourses in England designated as Main Rivers by the Environment Agency.

Watercourses designated as ‘main river’ are generally the larger arterial watercourses. The Environment Agency has permissive powers, but not a duty, to carry out maintenance, improvement or construction work on designated main rivers.

All other open water courses in England are determined by statute as an ‘ordinary watercourse’. On these watercourses the Lead Local flood Authority or, if within an Internal Drainage District, the Internal Drainage Board have similar permissive powers to maintain and improve.

This web map service (WMS) is the 25m raster version of the Land Cover Map 2015 (LCM2015) for Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It shows the target habitat class with the highest percentage cover in each 25m x 25m pixel. The 21 target classes are based on the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) Broad Habitats, which encompass the entire range of UK habitats.The 25m raster web map service is the most detailed of the LCM2015 raster products, both thematically and spatially, and it is derived from the LCM2015 vector product. For LCM2015 per-pixel classifications were conducted, using a random forest classification algorithm. The resultant classifications were then mosaicked together, with the best classifications taking priority. This produced a per-pixel classification of the UK, which was then 'imported' into the spatial framework, recording a number of attributes, including the majority class per polygon which is the Land Cover class for each polygon.Find out more about Land Cover Map 2015 at ceh.ac.uk.LCM2015 is available for download to Catchment Based Approach (CaBA) Partnerships in the desktop GIS data package. Please contact your CaBA catchment host for further information.

The Living Atlas is the foremost collection of geographic information from around the globe. It includes maps, apps, and data layers to support your work. In addition, you can also search other public data published by other organisation within ArcGIS Online.

Do you resonate with the following workflow?You've been making your maps using screengrabs from Google Maps and overlaying your annotations on PowerPoint or other third party software.You don't have control over how your map looks and what context you can show your readers.

[From The Landmap Project: Introduction, "http://www.landmap.ac.uk/background/intro.html"]

 A joint project to provide orthorectified satellite image mosaics of Landsat,
 SPOT and ERS radar data and a high resolution Digital Elevation Model for the
 whole of the UK. These data will be in a form which can easily be merged with
 other data, such as road networks, so that any user can quickly produce a
 precise map of their area of interest.

 Predominately aimed at the UK academic and educational sectors these data and
 software are held online at the Manchester University super computer facility
 where users can either process the data remotely or download it to their local
 network.

 Please follow the links to the left for more information about the project or
 how to obtain data or access to the radar processing system at MIMAS. Please
 also refer to the MIMAS spatial-side website,
 "http://www.mimas.ac.uk/spatial/", for related remote sensing materials.

You will need an ArcGIS Online account for this lesson plan. If you do not have one, or have forgotten your details contact your institution's IT administrator. Alternatively, email highered@esriuk.com to get in touch for further assistance.

Recently a teacher asked the following question about mapping data to OS grid squares. An interesting question, and one that I thought other teachers and students might find useful, so here goes!

Interactive map service (http://ims.sea.gov.ua:8081/website/Atlas_forAll_en/viewer.htm), based on GIS database ATLAS has been created by UkrSCES to provide an integrated picture of the modern state of the Black Sea coastal zone. It provides information on the geography of NWBS coastal zone and coastal water areas, as well as data on demography, natural resources, economy and pollution. The work is financed under the auspices of the Ministry for Environmental Protection of Ukraine. ATLAS is organised around several themes and elements, comprising interactive maps, statistical data, and descriptions. The cartography is based on the digital topographic chart of Ukraine (scale 1:500,000) and includes the following thematic layers: * Natural resources, * Protected territories, * Pollution resources, * Recreational potential, * Coastal zone. The main part of the descriptive text of ATLAS is drawn from the results of various studies that were undertaken by UkrSCES from 1993 to 2006. ATLAS allows users to select and display information on the resources, state and condition оf the NWBS coastal zone. This interactive service can be employed not only by experts and those responsible for decision-making, but also by the general public. It represents a major contribution to Ukraine's responsibilities under the Aarhus Convention for access to environmental information.

The Unpublished Digital Surficial Geologic-GIS Map of Gateway National Recreation Area and Vicinity, New Jersey and New York is composed of GIS data layers and GIS tables in a 10.1 file geodatabase (gwsf_geology.gdb), a 10.1 ArcMap (.MXD) map document (gwsf_geology.mxd), individual 10.1 layer (.LYR) files for each GIS data layer, an ancillary map information (.PDF) document (gate_geology.pdf) which contains source map unit descriptions, as well as other source map text, figures and tables, metadata in FGDC text (.TXT) and FAQ (.HTML) formats, and a GIS readme file (gwsf_gis_readme.pdf). Please read the gwsf_gis_readme.pdf for information pertaining to the proper extraction of the file geodatabase and other map files. To request GIS data in ESRI 10.1 shapefile format contact Stephanie O’Meara (stephanie.omeara@colostate.edu; see contact information below). The data is also available as a 2.2 KMZ/KML file for use in Google Earth, however, this format version of the map is limited in data layers presented and in access to GRI ancillary table information. Google Earth software is available for free at: http://www.google.com/earth/index.html. Users are encouraged to only use the Google Earth data for basic visualization, and to use the GIS data for any type of data analysis or investigation. The data were completed as a component of the Geologic Resources Inventory (GRI) program, a National Park Service (NPS) Inventory and Monitoring (I&M) Division funded program that is administered by the NPS Geologic Resources Division (GRD). Source geologic maps and data used to complete this GRI digital dataset were provided by the following: New Jersey Geological Survey and New York State Museum. Detailed information concerning the sources used and their contribution the GRI product are listed in the Source Citation section(s) of this metadata record (gwsf_metadata_faq.html; available at http://nrdata.nps.gov/geology/gri_data/gis/gate/gwsf_metadata_faq.html). Users of this data are cautioned about the locational accuracy of features within this dataset. Based on the source map scale of 1:100,000 and United States National Map Accuracy Standards features are within (horizontally) 127 meters or 416.7 feet of their actual location as presented by this dataset. Users of this data should thus not assume the location of features is exactly where they are portrayed in Google Earth, ArcGIS or other software used to display this dataset. All GIS and ancillary tables were produced as per the NPS GRI Geology-GIS Geodatabase Data Model v. 2.3. (available at: http://science.nature.nps.gov/im/inventory/geology/GeologyGISDataModel.cfm). The GIS data projection is NAD83, UTM Zone 18N, however, for the KML/KMZ format the data is projected upon export to WGS84 Geographic, the native coordinate system used by Google Earth. The data is within the area of interest of Gateway National Recreation Area.

In the middle of 2001 Roger Kain and Richard Oliver, from the University of Exeter, published a substantial work entitled Historic Parishes of England and Wales: Electronic Map - Gazetteer- Metadata. This was the final product of a project aimed at locating and mapping the boundaries of parish and sub-parish units of the mid-nineteenth century. The authors published the results in a series of electronic maps supplied on CD-ROM. Each one of these 115 maps contain a scanned 1”:1 mile OS New Popular Series map, overlain by the boundaries. A reference number can be found in each of the polygons that can then be used to look up information about that parish in gazetteer in an accompanying book.

A major limitation of this work is that although the boundaries are in digital form, they are divided into 115 tiles, none of which have any spatial co-ordinate information inherent in them. This means that although the maps are invaluable as a reference tool, they can not be used together within a GIS to select, analyse and present historic information.

We have therefore created a single digital map of the boundaries to provide a single, continuous coverage of polygons, each of which contain the information provided by Kain and Oliver in their accompanying book. This information includes the parish name, Ancient County, and a reference number that coincides with entries for that parish in the 1851 census report.

It is recommended that users also order disc 1 of study 4348; Historic Parishes of England and Wales : an Electronic Map of Boundaries before 1850 with a Gazetteer and Metadata

Please note: this study does not include information on named individuals and would therefore not be useful for personal family history research.

The Flood Map for Planning Service includes several layers of information. This includes the Flood Zones data which shows the extent of land at present day risk of flooding from rivers and the sea, ignoring the benefits of defences, for the following scenarios:

• Flood Zone 1 – Land having a less than 0.1% (1 in 1000) annual probability of flooding. • Flood Zone 2 – Land having between 0.1% - 1% (1 in 100 to 1 in 1000) annual probability of flooding from rivers or between 0.1% - 0.5% (1 in 200 to 1 in 1000) annual probability of flooding from the sea, and accepted recorded flood outlines . • Flood Zone 3 – Areas shown to be at a 1% (1 in 100) or greater annual probability of flooding from rivers or 0.5% (1 in 200) or greater annual probability of flooding from the sea.

Flood Zone 1 is not shown in this dataset, but covers all areas not contained within Flood Zones 2 and 3. Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) use the Flood Zones to determine if they must consult the Environment Agency on planning applications. They are also used to determine if development is incompatible and whether development is subject to the exception test. The Flood Zones are one of several flood risk datasets used to determine the need for planning applications to be supported by a Flood Risk Assessment (FRA) and subject to the sequential test.

The Flood Zones are a composite dataset including national and local modelled data, and information from past floods.

The Flood Zones are designed to only give an indication of flood risk to an area of land and are not suitable for showing whether an individual property is at risk of flooding. This is because we cannot know all the details about each property.

Users of these datasets should always check they are suitable for the intended use

To Digitise in ArcGIS Online you will need to Add Map Notes. Follow the following steps to digitise the area of an agricultural field: