Informing Wildfire Management and Land Restoration Activities at the National Trust Marsden Moor Estate: The Co-development of a Mobile Application to Produce a Detailed Land Cover Map Using Vision-1 Satellite Data.

The Marsden Moor Estate owned by the National Trust in West Yorkshire, is a Special Area of Conservation (SAC), Special Protection Area (SPA) and Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) (JNCC, 2021). Over the past four years, there have been large wildfire events on the estate (26 February 2019, 22 April 2019, 23 March 2020, 25 April 2021, 18 March 2022 and 23 March 2022). Since 2019, the National Trust reported a total of £700,000 worth of damage caused by wildfires on the Marsden Moor Estate (National Trust, 2022). To better inform wildfire management and land restoration activities it was identified that a detailed land cover map of the different vegetation types using high resolution 3.5m Vision-1 satellite data should be investigated. At the time of commencing this research the most detailed land cover map available was 20m Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) Land Cover map. Working in partnership, researchers at The University of Manchester and the National Trust Marsden Moor Survey Group co-developed a mobile application using ArcGIS Survey123 to collect ground truth data of vegetation types. The initial vegetation surveys took place in July/August 2021 followed by in December 2021 an additional vegetation survey/mobile application training for volunteers. The vegetation surveys aided the identification of training areas for performing a supervised Maximum Likelihood Classification on the Vision-1 satellite image (acquired 31 July 2020). The overall land cover map accuracy achieved was 68%. The Marsden Moor Survey Group identified misclassification of known bracken areas as a potential source of error. After consultation with the National Trust volunteers, a Vision-1 image was tasked by Airbus (acquired 12 November 2021) to assess if bracken areas could be classified more successfully during the autumn period and to improve the final land cover map product.