Peaty Soils Location

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Natural England undertook to produce a map of the location of peat soils. Following a review of the National Soils Map (NSRI, 2005), areas were classified into 4 different categories on the basis of their soil association. These were: Key peaty soils, Intermediate peaty soils, other organic soils and Mineral soils.The following other data sources were introduced into the mapping process:• National Peat Resources Inventory (NPRI - an inventory of raised bog, and raised bog peat) • Biodiversity Action Plan mapping of Blanket Bog and Fen • Drift geology (British Geological Survey, 2003)• Marsh, Reeds and Saltmarsh polygons from Ordnance Survey Mastermap data (OS, 2008).The provenance of the data predicting the location of deep peaty soils was determined, and each polygon was labelled with a code which indicated the dataset or sets upon which it was based. This generated 55 different “overlap” classes all of which are listed, alongside their six-letter codes, in Appendix 5. The area of land mapped as supporting deep peaty soils was determined, and the 13 highest priority overlap classes were identified. These represented the 12 overlap classes which accounted for more than 1% of the area of deep peaty soil mapped, and between them covered 91.7% of all deep peat mapped. An additional single-source class (NPRI only) was added to ensure that all single-source overlap classes would be represented in the validation exercise. The 13 classes selected covered 92.1% of all deep peaty soils mapped. From these 13 classes 10 polygons between 20 and 100 ha in size were randomly selected for ground truthing.