Habitat mapping

The project “Mapping of terrestrial habitats: improvement of territorial information on a national scale” aims to generate a cartography of state habitats with a double legend: Habitats of Community Interest (HIC) and the Spanish Standard List of Habitats (LPEH).

HICs are the habitats of Annex I of the Habitats Directive (Directive 92/43/EEC). In the annex itself it is already indicated that they are habitats for whose conservation it is necessary to designate Special Conservation Areas; That is, it is a list of habitats for conservation purposes, but it does not include all the variability of habitats in the territory.

In order to map all the territorial variability, the LPEH legend is used, which is extensive and exhaustive for the entire territory. Currently there is a LPEH published by MITECO, but it is based on the old version of EUNIS (habitat classification used by the European Environment Agency). Given the new EUNIS updates, in this project a task is underway to update the LPEH so that it can be used as a legend.

The project uses a Baseline Cartography (CBP) based on the 1:25,000 scale products of the Forest Map of Spain. Methodologically, work is being done in parallel by groups of habitats so that the contents of forests, bushes, grasses, artificial and crops are assigned directly to the CBP polygons while for certain azonal habitats (coastal, peat bogs, lenitic and forests and bushes riverbank) there is freedom of digitalization.

For the assignment of content (and where appropriate, for digitization) various European, state and regional information sources are being used, placing special emphasis on the latter, using the maps of regional habitats in those communities that have them.

The information generated is made available to the autonomous communities through a VIEWER with restricted access for review and consultation. Currently, the project is fine-tuning the work methodologies for each group of habitats and beginning to assign content to some of them.