Project History: Creating and Cleansing Datasets

Natural England is a public body sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It’s the Government’s adviser for the natural environment in England, helping to protect the nature and the environment.

Over the last eight years we have created and cleansed various datasets for Natural England providing up-to-date, accurate and useful information on which decisions and policies can be made. The most recent project was to create a soil sample dataset.

The Challenge: Using Historic Soil Sample Data to Create a GIS Dataset

Using historic soil sample data, supplied in a variety of formats including reports, PDF maps and CSV files, we created a GIS dataset.

Using a base map we georeferenced the locations of two soil sample datasets. One showing the ‘location of auger sample points’ and the second showing ‘soil pits’. The ‘location of auger sample points’ had to be digitised from numerous CSV files into one dataset containing all 1,591 Agricultural Land Classification. Where there was additional information about the soil samples these were attached as attributes to the dataset so Natural England could easily access and reference. The process took four weeks.

The Outcome: Geospatial Datasets

The datasets were supplied as two ESRI shapefiles (geospatial vector formats) one for the auger sample points and one for the soil pits.