Land use/land cover on the South Downs, England in the 1870s: A case study mapping and applying landscape metrics to the Ordnance Survey Parish Books of Reference

Abstract

Land use/land cover sits alongside other basic types of information about a country, such as its population and economy. However, in contrast with population data, which have been supplied by the decennial British Population Census since 1801 (apart from 1941), the routine and periodic collection of land‐use/land‐cover data has proved more challenging. Notable exceptions include the First and Second Land Utilisation surveys of the 1930s and 1960s, and the Countryside Surveys using a stratified sample of 1‐km grid squares undertaken periodically since 1984. The focus here is on the land‐use/land‐cover data collected by the Ordnance Survey from the 1850s to 1880s as part of the cadastral mapping of the country at 1:2500 scale. This information was published in Parish Books of Reference. These documents for parishes covering the South Downs, a National Character Area and National Park, in East and West Sussex provide the attribute data for the land parcels that have been joined to digitised polygons in order map land use/land cover across this area for the mid‐1870s. Classification of these data into 20 land‐use/land‐cover types enabled visual assessment and quantitative analysis using statistical techniques and spatial indices to explore the complexity of the landscape. Having shown the feasibility of mapping land‐use/land‐cover data for the South Downs, the paper concludes by considering issues involved in extending this work to other counties for which the Books of Reference were published.