CEH and Remote Sensing Applications Consultants Ltd (RSAC) are collaborating on a project called Land Cover plus: Crops which exploits Copernicus Sentinel-1 C-band SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) and Sentinel-2 optical data to produce annual crop maps for the whole of the United Kingdom.
By linking the land-cover maps of Britain made by Sir Dudley Stamp in the 1930s with data from the Countryside Surveys of Britain run by the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH), scientists have shown how nectar plants declined up to the 1970s and stabilised between the 1970s and 2000, and increased between 2000 and 2007.