Services - Land Cover, Land Use and Landscape

Georgia Rangelands

Environment Systems has been working in the Georgia Rangelands. The Rangelands form a vast steppe of grasslands that stretch from central Russia, to the slopes of the Caucasus Mountains. They form part of the traditional and vital pastoral agricultural system of Georgia, a large component of which is ‘transhumance’, the movement of livestock from winter pastures to summer pastures on the higher mountains. The condition of the rangeland is a key concern, an indicator of the management and use to which it is subject, the level of its exploitation and the effects of climate change.

This project utilised satellite imagery and our own established remote sensing expertise to investigate existing rangeland ecology, meteorological patterns and local topography. There is also a field based ‘ground-truthing’ element including field surveys and local intelligence gathering to garner opinion, ascertain local perceptions of the effects of climate change and to improve project understanding of the livestock and farming system.

The extent of rangeland degradation employs indices such as NDVI (Normalised Difference Vegetation Index) to provide an assessment of the amount of vegetative cover and the amount of bare ground present. The project also seeks to identify areas of rangeland that are currently under-utilised.

LANDMAP

LANDMAP is at the heart of sustainable landscape management in Wales. It is a national landscape information system, devised by the Countryside Council for Wales in association with the Wales Landscape Partnership Group that gathers, organises and evaluates information about landscape into a nationally consistent data set. LANDMAP has been designed to provide the clarity and detail of information that various land management and development planning activities require. LANDMAP consists of five layers or aspects, covering Landscape, Habitat (biodiversity), Visual and Sensory, Historical, Cultural and Earth Science. Together these layers cover all those elements of the landscape that are important to enable consistent local, regional and national landscape planning and decision-making.

Environment Systems:

• Delivered LANDMAP expert evaluated aspects for large parts of Wales across rural, urban and coastal environments
• Recorded and evaluated biodiversity and landscape characteristics that are of prime importance in effective landscape planning
• Delivered quality assurance and updating exercises
• Developed a novel approach to the work using high accuracy elevation models and aerial photography to model the landscape