ITE Merlewood Land Classification of Great Britain

Abstract

The Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (ITE) has classified the 1 km squares in Great Britain (GB) into thirtytwo environmental strata, termed land classes, as a basis for ecological survey. The classes have been used in biogeographical studies of the distribution of individual species and species assemblages. The concept behind the technique is that there is an association between the environmental character of land and ecological parameters. The initial classification was based on a sample of squares drawn from a regular grid. The data for the 1212 1 km squares classified were drawn from published maps; the number of squares was limited by the available computing power. Subsequently the availability of more powerful computers and the need to improve geographical definition have led to the allocation of every 1 km square to its appropriate class. This paper has been written to summarise the principles involved in the development of the system and indicate the range of projects for which it has been used. The extension of the classification from a sample to the complete coverage of GB revealed the importance of the structure and style of data used to produce the classification. The significance of these conclusions for future work is discussed, with particular reference to automated methods of data capture.

Projected environmental shifts under climate change: European trends and regional impacts

“…The discriminant functions allocate an EnS stratum for each combination of climate conditions, effectively smoothing the original strata (Bunce et al 1996a). The 1969The -1990 baseline strata of the EnS were compared with the strata allocation determined by the discriminant functions to test how accurately they reproduced the original classification.…”

Habitat selection by SkylarksAlauda arvensiswintering in Britain in 1997/98

“…The remaining 1-km squares were classified using four ITE landscape types: arable, pastoral, marginal upland and upland (Bunce et al 1996). Most upland squares had already been removed on the basis of being outside the Skylark's winter range.…”

Ecological landscape elements: long-term monitoring in Great Britain, the Countryside Survey 1978–2007 and beyond

“…The most recent (2007) Land Classification is available as Bunce et al (2007). National estimate datasets are also available as both non-spatial flat files (Barr et al, 2014a, d, e, g, i, k, l;Brown et al, 2014b, d;Bunce et al, 2012a) and spatial national datasets (Bunce et al, 2012b;Brown et al, 2014c, a;Barr et al, 2014bBarr et al, , c, f, h, j, m, 2015a Standardization, 2015) in the UK Gemini 2.1 profile (UK GEMINI, 2015).…”

“…By the end of the 1980s, all 1 km squares in GB had been classified into the same 32 strata, which was not technically possible at the start of the 1970s. Known as the "Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (ITE) Land Classification of Great Britain" (Bunce et al, , 1996a, it has evolved over the 30-year period 45 strata (or "land classes"). Further details are provided in Wood et al (2017) and Barr and Wood (2011).…”

“…The stratification used is the ITE Land Classification of 1 km squares in GB (Fig. 2), which is based on a statistical analysis of topographic, physiographic and climatic attributes as described in (Bunce et al, 1996a, c) and summarised in Sect. 2.…”