Monitoring Losses of Semi-natural Vegetation to Agricultural Grassland from Satellite Imagery in the Antrim Coast and Glens AONB, Northern Ireland

Countryside management in Northern Ireland increasingly requires information on the changing distribution and composition of semi-natural vegetation within the Provinceʹs Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs). Field data, collected during a landscape ecological survey of the Antrim Coast and Glens AONB, were used o derive and calibrate supervised classifications of land use and semi-natural vegetation from satellite imagery. Increases in the amount of agricultural grassland and decreases in semi-natural vegetation over an 8-year period in the AONB were quantified from Landsat satellite imagery for 1976 and 1984. Using geographical information systems (GIS) software, land use and semi-natural vegetation maps for each of the two years were overlaid to locate where, within the AONB, change was most concentrated.