Land Cover Scotland (LCS) 1988 was the first ever national (air-photo) census of land cover in Scotland to describe the principal features and characteristics of the countryside. It was produced by The Macaulay Land Use Research Institute (now the James Hutton Institute) on behalf of Scottish Government to assist in the development and monitoring of policies affecting the state of the Scottish countryside. It was intended that the 1988 LCS be used as a baseline for monitoring change. The classification system allows for 126 land cover types to be identified as point, line or area features. An important aspect of the classification system is that it allows for mosaics of the land cover types to be identified, where the pattern of cover types was so complex that individual types could not, at the selected interpretation scale, be separated. Over 1300 mosaics are identified in the LCS dataset.
