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What this layer is
Two separate datasets combine to tell the story of how the catchment is currently used:
- The UKCEH Land Cover Map classifies every 10-metre square of Britain into one of 21 habitat categories — broadleaf woodland, coniferous woodland, arable, improved grassland, semi-natural grassland, heather, bog, inland water, urban and so on. It is updated roughly every 5–10 years, with the most recent release based on 2021 satellite data.
- The Defra Crop Map of England goes further for farmland specifically: identifying what crop is in each field in each year, back to 2016, using satellite imagery and machine learning.
Together they give a year-by-year picture of what is happening on the land.
What it reveals in this catchment
For the cluster area, several things stand out:
- Grassland-dominated. The majority of the cluster's 700 hectares is grassland of various intensities — a mix of improved grazing, semi-improved, and small patches of species-rich semi-natural grassland, particularly on heavier clays and wetter ground.
- Significant woodland coverage. Broadleaf woodland accounts for a substantial proportion, including ancient woodland sites, shaws, and small copses connecting fields. Coniferous plantations are a minority component.
- Little arable. Unlike catchments further east towards the North Downs, the Upper Medway is not extensively cropped. Where arable does appear it tends to be in rotation blocks on better-drained ground.
- Scattered horticulture. Small orchards, market gardens and mixed holdings remain in the cluster — a tradition that goes back to the High Weald's long history of small-scale fruit and veg production for London.
- Change signals. Over the five-year Crop Map window you can see individual fields shifting between arable rotations and grass leys, reflecting both policy signals and business decisions.
What land stewards can do with this
- Baseline your own mix. The first step in any landscape-scale habitat strategy is knowing what the current balance actually is. The CEH/Defra data gives the cluster an objective starting point that every member can see.
- Target gaps. Visualising cover at cluster scale makes gaps obvious — stretches with little connective woodland, sub-catchments where grassland has been intensively improved throughout, or areas where species-rich habitat is isolated.
- Measure change. Every new release of the data is another data-point in the story. If the cluster is delivering habitat creation, that should show up in the numbers within a few years.
- Make the case to funders. Habitat creation proposals are materially stronger when submitted with current-state data, a proposed future state, and a credible account of the delta.
Data sources: UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology Land Cover Map (Open Government Licence) and the Defra / Rural Payments Agency Crop Map of England. Cluster-level clipping, summarisation and change-over-time analysis by the ecology platform.