Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
term change will greatly aid in our interpretation of the evidence arising
from landscape monitoring programmes such as Countryside Quality
Counts.” 22 One way this can happen is through beter understanding of
the landscapes associated with “low input farming,” which we are maybe
moving back toward.
All of these agencies therefore have an interest in past land use,
especially agricultural land use. To some extent, any conventional top-
ographic map provides information on the uses people make of the
land they live on: maps usually identify buildings and transport routes.
However, large areas of topographic maps are simply empty or identified
only as fields. In recent years, we know considerably more from satel-
lite imagery, especially “false color” images showing nonvisible wave-
lengths. Some information for historical periods can be derived from
sources such as tithe maps, but these were not created for all areas, and
not all survive. For Britain, the first systematic national survey of land
use was the Land Utilisation Survey of Great Britain (LUSGB), directed
in the 1930s by Professor Sir L. Dudley Stamp of the London School
of Economics (LSE), working in collaboration with the Geographical
Association and county education commitees and through them with
the country's schools.
Participating schools were supplied with instructions and with six-
inches-to-one-mile maps of their locality. Pupils, supervised by their
teachers, went out into the countryside and recorded land use by mark-
ing each plot on the maps with a code leter, as shown in igure 4.3. hese
field survey maps were returned to Stamp's team and used to prepare
one-inch-to-one-mile maps for publication. Stamp paid the Ordnance
Survey for the use of the printing plates for the black layer of the then-
current Popular Edition maps - effectively a GIS coverage - and then
overprinted land-use information as a series of different colors, includ-
ing brown for arable, green for pasture, yellow for rough grazing, and
red for “agriculturally unproductive,” which covers both dense urban
areas and industrial sites. Although the bulk of the survey was carried
out quite quickly between 1931 and 1934, funding publication of the
maps proved much harder, even with government support once Stamp
became chief advisor to the Ministry of Agriculture in 1942. A total of
Search WWH ::




Custom Search