GGES6013                    Core Skills in GIS                    Assignment 1

Assignment 1:

Mapping hedgerows on the Isle of Wight

OR

Mapping intertidal habitats around Lymington

50% of total module mark

Scenario: Hedgerows

In the UK and many other western European countries, hedgerows are an important ecological feature of agricultural landscapes (Baudry, Bunce and Burel, 2000). Hedgerows can act as ‘corridors’, connecting together patches of woodland within an otherwise arable landscape and enabling wildlife to move between such patches.  Furthermore, in England the hedgerows themselves can act as habitat for species such as the dormouse.  Hedgerow structure (e.g. height, width and species composition) as well as gappiness is important in determining its value as a habitat (see the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs link below).  In the UK, landowners can receive subsidies from government through various agri-environmental schemes for maintaining, restoring or creating hedgerows. For these reasons, conservationists have had a long-standing interest in surveying and mapping hedgerows in the UK (Lauver, Busby, and Whistler 2002).

Data Provided

You will find a shapefile called IsleWightGrid on the GGES6013 Blackboard site under Assignments > Assignment 1. This contains a set of 1 by 1km grid squares for the central Isle of Wight on the south coast of England.    You will be allocated one of these grid squares for your assignment, together with a number of other class members.

Task

You have been asked to map hedgerows in a study area on the Isle of Wight as part of a wildlife conservation project, looking at habitat connectivity on the island.  The resultant data will be used to prioritise the awarding of grants to local landowners for planting or restoring hedgerows in the area.

For your allocated 1 by 1km grid square, create a geodatabase into which you can manually digitise (using on-screen heads-up digitising) the locations of hedgerows based on any source of online remotely sensed imagery of your choice for this area.  You may choose to represent hedgerows as lines or polygons and you may wish to add attributes to your hedgerows.

In a report of no more than 2,000 words:

· Briefly describe your methodology, including how you developed your geodatabase and undertook any subsequent analysis operations.

· Include at least one map depicting the hedgerows that you have digitised within your allocated grid square and present at least one summary statistic which summarises the distribution and/or characteristics of the hedgerows within your grid square, e.g. the total area or length of hedgerows within your grid square.

· Evaluate the accuracy of the hedgerows that you have digitised (for example by comparing the boundaries that you have digitised with those of a colleague working on the same grid square, or the previously digitised dataset provided by the teaching team, or any other secondary dataset which you consider relevant). Include at least one statistic to support your assessment of its accuracy.