Digital Mapping at ERCCIS

What is a GIS?

A geographic information system (GIS) is the combination of hardware, software, and data for capturing, managing, analysing, and displaying all forms of geographically referenced information. By using a GIS, ERCCIS can view, understand, question, interpret, and visualise data in many ways that reveal relationships, patterns, and trends in the form of maps, charts and reports (adapted from ESRI.com 2011)

ERCCIS and GIS

ERCCIS owns, produces and manages hundreds of Geographic Information System (GIS) datasets relating to the biodiversity, ecology, habitat, species and geography of Cornwall. These GIS datasets include the Cornwall land cover layers, the Cornwall Biodiversity Action Plan broad habitat and priority habitat layers, All the statutory (e.g. SSSI) and non-statutory (e.g. County Wildlife Sites) site locations and designations layers, dataset showing land use and practices, distribution of species and many others.

ERCCIS holds a huge amount of data, stored in a variety of formats and in many locations. A GIS is the only way to integrate all of this data so that we can analyse everything as a whole and leverage it into decision-making tools.

At ERCCIS we use GIS everyday to perform a huge variety of tasks, including;

Using GIS to find features or locations and for finding patterns (distribution of features), for example displaying the County Wildlife Sites locations in Cornwall.

Mapping details of an area

Use GIS to monitor what's happening at a local level, for example producing maps and summaries of the biodiversity of a parish

Map Quantities or Densities

Using GIS to show where the most and least are, displaying areas that meet specific criteria, looking at the relationships between places or displaying the number of features in a uniform areal unit, such as square kilometre (density). For example looking at all the recording effort for a species group in Cornwall.

Using GIS to map the changes in species or landscape, evaluate the results of an action or policies, map where and how things move over a period of time to gain an insight into behaviour or mapping conditions before and after an action or event to see the impact. For example seeing the change in land cover between 1995 and 2005, for more detail please click here.

Some of our GIS data is only available to our Service Level Agreement partners or for usage in the Record Centre. However a large number of our GIS datasets are available on request. This is sometimes free, but charging will vary depending on end use of the information. If you are interested in accessing any of the GIS data that ERCCIS hold or you want to discuss licensing of GIS information, please contact the Data Officer to discuss further.