OS Enhanced Land Cover (Beta)

OS Enhanced Land Cover (Beta) is a vector dataset from Ordnance Survey that maps land cover, vegetation and habitat types across England, using the UKHab classification that underpins the statutory biodiversity metric for Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG). It addresses a bottleneck created by BNG legislation: developers must baseline the habitats on a site as part of a planning application, and the ecologists who do that work are in high demand.

The dataset combines topography and land cover from the OS National Geographic Database, OS 25 cm aerial imagery and OS Terrain 5 with third-party open habitat data, including Natural England's Living England habitat map and the Rural Payments Agency's Crop Map of England. Both are machine-learning classifications built from Copernicus Sentinel satellite imagery (the Crop Map of England uses Sentinel-1 radar and Sentinel-2 optical images), so the habitat and crop attribution draws on satellite observation. The result is a provisional assessment of habitats that supports desktop BNG screening, field checks by ecologists, and the planning of re-wilding, green corridors and flood-risk management projects.

It is supplied as a GeoPackage download, exclusively through OS Partners; as a beta it is offered to partners on a limited-time trial and is not part of the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement. Wessex Water has used it, through partner Linckia's Habitat Fabric BNG application on Esri, to assess hundreds of sites in one spatial picture; Linckia reports a 40% reduction in data processing costs compared with earlier approaches, rising to 90% compared with processing imagery for the same outcomes.