Habitat mapping of the Cairngormes Connect restoration area

This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Isabel Mansley. It is co-supervised with David Coomes and Aland Chan.

The Cairngorms Connect is the largest landscape restoration project in the UK. Four landowners (RSPB, Wildlands Ltd, FLS, and NatureScot) embarked on a 200-year vision to restore over 600 km2 of land in the Cairngorms National Park with an emphasis on natural processes.

In July, 2023, the Centre for Landscape Regeneration commissioned a flight over a 400 km2 stretch of land over the area, collecting both high resolution RGBI imagery (0.1m ground resolution) and LiDAR data. Various research projects were built on this dataset, including studies into carbon cycling, shrub ecology, tree regeneration, and deadwood detection.

Existing habitat maps of the area are based on Sentinel 2 satellite data at a ground resolution of 10m. While this dataset provides a good basis for some research objectives, a habitat map that could leverage the high resolution of the aerial imagery would potentially be able to capture fine-scale variations in habitat structure more accurately. This project involves applying new developments in geospatial machine learning (specifically the Tessera one developed locally in Cambridge) to achieve this.