FME World Tour UK – 13th May: Well-being Indicator 43 (Natural Resources Wales)

FME World Tour UK – 13th May: Well-being Indicator 43 – using FME to assess the extent of semi-natural habitat in Wales (Natural Resources Wales)

Welsh Government’s Well-being of Future Generations Act (2015) places an obligation on public bodies to only make decisions after considering the impact on people now and in the future. Linked to this, an agreed set of National Indicators has been developed to track progress towards Well-being goals. Natural Resources Wales carries out the analysis work for National Well-being Indicator 43, the area of healthy ecosystems in Wales, using an assessment of the extent of terrestrial semi-natural habitat as a proxy measure.

Multiple large datasets were used in this assessment: a reclassification of the existing Phase 1 habitat map; vegetation indices calculated from spring and summer Sentinel-2 satellite data, which show areas that appear to be artificially productive in spring; zonal statistics incorporating elevation, slope, aspect and distance north because of their impact on vegetation growth; and Welsh Government rural payments data, showing fields with improved agriculture. These datasets were combined using a ruleset in FME to determine image objects that were semi-natural or candidate semi-natural habitat. In 2018, we found that 31% of Wales was semi-natural habitat, but that there were large differences between upland (74%) and lowland (19%) areas. The indicator will be updated in 2020, using more recent satellite imagery and agricultural data and additional ground-truthing of candidate areas.

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