Digimap is an online map and data delivery service, available by subscription to UK Higher and Further Education establishments. Operated by EDINA at the University of Edinburgh, Digimap offers a number of data collections, including Ordnance Survey, historical, geological, aerial photography, LiDAR, marine maps, land cover mapping, global mapping and census data. For more information about Digimap go to our website: https://digimap.edina.ac.uk Background image Contains OS data (c) Crown Copyright and database right 2022
//Digimap is happy to announce the Environment Collection’s webinar ‘The Land Cover Map Family: Land Cover, Crops and Hedgerows’. Presented by Dr. Clare Rowland Earth Observation Scientist and Emily Upcott Spatial Ecologist.
Date: 06 February 2024
Time: 1:00 PM
You can register Here
//We are delighted to announce that Environment Digimap now offers the CEH Land Cover® Plus: Crops dataset. CEH Land Cover® Plus: Crops has been produced by the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in partnership with Remote Sensing Applications Consultants and provides annually updated arable crop information for the whole of Great Britain.
Environment Digimap is the only platform dedicated to the academic sector offering this data. CEH Land Cover® Plus: Crops data is available for both 2016 and 2017. Environment Digimap’s Roam application has the new datasets displayed as alternative basemaps, allowing you to compare the two years side by side using the “2-up” map function. The opacity slider also enables the underlying context map to be viewed easily.
The Info Tool also enables you to query the Crops data, giving information about the crop name, code, the polygon identifier and the coordinates of the point chosen. All other functions in Roam operate as usual, including the ability to annotate measure and print. The Map Content is also available in the left hand panel to help you identify crop types.
The CEH Land Cover® Plus: Crops data is also available to download from Environment Download. Select your area of interest as usual, add the Crop data to your basket and select from File Geodatabase or GeoPackage as optional formats. You can also choose to select individual crop layers rather than the full suite if you wish.
If your institution has a subscription to Environment Digimap, this dataset is available at no additional charge. If your institution does not have a subscription to Environment Digimap, prices and details of the subscription process can be found on our website.*
*Please note that in order to place a subscription order you must be a suitably authorised member of staff. If you have any questions about this, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
//As mentioned at Geoforum earlier this year, we’re currently working hard on a new version of Digimap Roam. The new-look application will bring Digimap Roam, the online mapping tool in the Digimap family, bang up to date with the latest web technologies available. Whilst the functionality will remain the same, the look and feel of the interface will be more modern. The majority of functions will be available from a new menu panel down the left hand side which is hidden by default maximising the area available for the main map element. By utilising the latest technologies we will be able to add new functionality and make further enhancements to the application in the future.
The new interface makes further improvements to the experience on mobile devices, an area where we’re seeing an increase in usage across the service. A mock up of how the new Geology Roam interface might look is included below to give you an idea of the proposed layout and styling:
Currently we are on target to launch the new interface early in the first semester of the 2017-2018 academic year, but we will post progress updates on this blog as the new interface approaches completion. There will be a phased release with the new Roam applications with the Ordnance Survey Collection being first in line.
We appreciate that you may have teaching or lecture materials that may require updating as a result of this change in interface, so we will run all the existing Roam applications alongside the new versions so you can get up to speed with the new interface whilst the existing versions are still available. At the moment we anticipate running both versions in each Collection side by side until at least the end of the year. During this period we would welcome any comments and feedback that you may have.
As ever, if you have any questions about the new Roam, please do not hesitate to contact us.
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We are pleased to announce that the 2007 Land Cover Map of Great Britain, created by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), is now available in vector format in the Digimap Environment Download service. The new dataset makes it easier for users to perform spatial analysis, such as proximity analysis and land use studies.
The data is available in ESRI Shapefile format, which can be read by most modern Geographic Information Systems, and is supplied on 100km x 100km tiles. Accompanying the data are ESRI Layer files which can be used to display the data using 23 classes based on the UK Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP) Broad Habitats in ESRI software.
The addition of the vector version brings the availability of the 2007 Land Cover Map in line with the 2000 Land Cover Map. A full list of formats available for the 2007 data is included below:
Further information about the Land Cover Map 2007 can be found on the CEH website.
If you have any questions about the dataset or any other part of the service then please get in touch:
//We have added the Feature Information tool to Environment Roam. This allows you to select points on the map to identify what the land use is at that location. Some of the colours used on the maps are very similar, which, while necessary with so many different categories, makes the maps more difficult to interpret. When the opacity slider is used to see the base map through the colours there can be even less distinction. The feature information tool helps to overcome this difficulty. The tool is also vital for those with a colour vision deficiency,
To identify the land use category for a particular point, click on the i button in the bar above the map:
You will notice there is now a little question mark next to your mouse pointer, now click on a location to identify the land use at that point. A small red pin will appear on the map along with a box containing the information about the location clicked on:
This feature has been a part of the Historic, Geology and Marine Roam interfaces for some time. However, it took much longer to develop this tool for Environment Roam because the data is very different. Rather than querying a database about the location we use colour matching technology to find the corresponding legend entry for the location clicked on. For this reason, we can’t operate the Feature Information tool on the 1930s Dudley Stamp maps. These maps were hand coloured, often by different people using different equipment, therefore the digital versions of the colours are inconsistent. Since the Dudley Stamp maps have fewer land use categories there is less confusion in identifying the appropriate colours in the legend, but we recognise that there may still be difficulties for those with colour vision deficiency.
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As part of our work to demonstrate the value for money of the Digimap Collections, EDINA has calculated the commercial cost of all the data downloaded and maps created for printing. We calculated the values per institution for the period August 2013 to July 2014 then totalled them; this came to approximately £65.4 million. This estimate is a conservative one because we reduce the quantity of data downloaded by 60% to account for duplication. When all the maps printed and data downloaded were included in the calculation (i.e assuming users would continue to take their own data and maps, and not share them) this total rises to over £107 million.
We know that some data is downloaded multiple times within an institution, for example by students for a class exercise or by researchers for specific study sites. We found that on average only 40% of the data taken from Digimap over a period of time was unique within an institution. We believe that if institutions were paying commercial rates for their data they would be more likely to download it once and circulate it to those who need it; this is why we reduce the amount of data included in our calculation. However, there is considerable variation between institutions as to how much is unique; those that do more research or are smaller in size tend to have a greater proportion of unique downloads, so we calculated the 100% figure as a ceiling value.
In total, over the past four academic years over £306 million (£170 million at 40%) worth of print maps and data has been served up from Digimap to subscribing institutions. The steep increase in 2013-14 was caused by more Ordnance Survey products being downloaded and printed than ever before and also by the high commercial costs of several products added to the Geology Digimap service.
The costs used in our calculations for the data come from the list prices published by data suppliers, and include any relevant multipliers or discounts declared publicly on their websites.
The data costs we calculated are done on a per product / per institution basis, with the data preparation and licensing charges assigned only once per product, per institution (rather than per data request). Many of the data collections are commercially licensed based on the number of users who have access to the data; with increasing numbers of users a multiplier is applied to a base cost. We applied the relevant multipliers according to the number of active registered users for each Collection at an institution.
We capped data costs at the price of national coverage for each product, making it impossible to assign greater cost for any one product than it would be to supply the entire dataset for use by a whole institution.
The values for the print maps (including saved maps in all Roam applications) are calculated by finding the cheapest commercially available map prints from websites such as eMapsite, NLS and FiND.
No monetary values were assigned to the millions of screen maps that are produced from Digimap. The value calculated also doesn’t take into account any of the help materials, training courses and support facilities that are all part of the Digimap service.
No OpenData downloads or maps created from OpenData are included in the calculation, despite the advantages of producing them from Digimap rather than other websites.
However, the biggest saving that isn’t included in these value calculations is your time. We only charged the data supplier’s preparation and licensing costs once per product or order, in line with each company’s policy where it applied. In reality there would be many orders occurring throughout an academic year as new research questions are raised. This all costs time, time which the data suppliers will charge for or that institutional staff would have to take to submit requests for data and time for staff to create and manage a repository for spatial data.
With 24 hour access to high quality data and maps through a purpose built mapping and data download interface, Digimap does all this work for its subscribers.
Over the coming weeks we will be sending out each institution’s data cost calculations to Digimap site representatives. If you are interested in the commercial costs of the maps and data your institution has been using please contact your site represenative. If you are unsure who your site representative is, please contact us:
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Digimap has some upcoming webinars and a free training event in London. Booking is available via the links below:
There will be more training events throughout the year; for more information or to request training for your institution, please contact us:
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EDINA and Jisc are pleased to announce the launch of a new Digimap Collection, Environment Digimap.
This new collection offers land cover map data from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH). Environment Digimap is a subscription service; however, it will be available free of charge until 31 July 2014. After this period a subscription fee will apply per institution.
Environment Digimap offers two facilities: mapping through Environment Roam, and the ability to download data through Environment Download. The data available, CEH’s Land Cover Map products, provide a snapshot of land cover for each of the years 1990, 2000 and 2007. There are raster datasets available at 25m and 1km resolutions for each year and a vector version of the 2000 dataset. The data are in a range of formats depending on the year. More details are available in the Environment Digimap Help Pages: CEH Products Available
To use this service for free your institution needs to subscribe, this is free till the end of the 2013 – 14 academic year and can be arranged via the Jisc Collections website:
Jisc Collections: Environment Digimap
If your institution doesn’t subscribe the Environment Digimap button on the home page will be grey. Contact your Digimap site rep and they will be able to help arrange your institutions subscription: List of Digimap Site Reps
If you have any questions about Environment Digimap, please contact us:
