This week CEHR triumphantly announced: ‘High-tech aerial mapping reveals England’s hedgerow landscape’
It would be marvellous to download the maps for Brighton & Hove as GIS files. However the links say: “Bespoke licensing conditions apply to these data. If you choose to download the data, the UKCEH Data Licensing team will contact you to negotiate a licence.”
Have you tried contacting them. If you wanted to do some analysis to check the accuracy of the data using boots on the ground etc then they might be keen to let you have some of it. They don’t want to release it all I suspect as some of the data ‘products’ are sold for large amounts to people who use certain types of data commercially.
They don’t want to release it… as the ‘products’ (= data provided through public funding) are sold for large amounts to people who are prepared to pay for it.
And therein lie the problem. Despite the Environmental Information Regulations and importance of sharing this information widely, the desire to sell Products and Services wins.
On BrightonWildlife.com we have mapped the habitat corridors we know about [click on associated map and select the side tab]. It would have been useful to add the hedgerow information.
“And therein lie the problem.”
Money usually wins out in a capitalist context; it’s in the nature of the beast.
When you say Public finding is that state funding?
I still think that if spoken to in the right way they might release a small chunk of the data for say the Brighton area so that samples could be independently checked and it would be an advert for the larger dataset which they could still charge for. They should be keen to say that their data have been checked and it is good.
Might need to find a university or similar to partner with for the research if they don’t give it out directly, we did do something on hedgerows many years ago when ispot started up but not since.
Thanks for your reply Mike. Life is too short 
Perhaps someone else will be interested in this thread and be able to access the actual polygons / map boundaries.
