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Aerial Photography Case StudiesDigital Aerial Photography
Cumbria County Council - 10 April 2006 Bluesky has delivered map accurate, digital aerial photography to Cumbria County Council. The imagery will update existing council datasets and provide a detailed 'real world' view of the entire county. The dataset, supplied as georeferenced digital image files, covers 6817 square kilometres of one of the most diverse landscapes in the UK. The county is at the heart of the UK's nuclear industry, providing a home to four licensed nuclear sites, whilst maintaining a reputation as one of the UK's most beautiful rural counties with three designated Areas of Outstanding National Beauty and the country's largest National Park; the Lake District. The digital photomap provides desktop access to high resolution, orthorectified aerial photography to users throughout the organisation via the Council's corporate geographic information systems (GIS). Current applications of the imagery include the analysis of vegetation patterns and the provision of information on current land uses to the county's ecologists, archaeological group and Development Control team. "The aerial photography enables initial site assessments to be made from the desktop, reducing the need for site visits which in a county the size of Cumbria is a great plus," said John Pell, Development Control Manager. "It provides real world detail to other council datasets when overlaid in our GIS and improves our customer service as we are able to actually look at a specific site when dealing with enquiries." Digital Aerial PhotographySherwood Forest Trust - 1st June 2005 Bluesky has provided Sherwood Forest Trust with digital aerial photography covering 470 square kilometres of the forest. The company has donated the imagery to the Trust after the area was photographed as part of a country-wide aerial survey by the Leicestershire based firm. The photography provides the most detailed view of the forest ever captured and will be used to map features and habitats on the Trust's computer mapping system. Sherwood Forest is known throughout the world as the home of legends. Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest are an important part of the nation's heritage and the non-profit making Trust is restoring ancient landscapes for the benefit of people and wildlife. As a registered charity, Sherwood Forest Trust depends upon charitable donations and support from individuals and companies such as Bluesky, whose support is vital in helping the Trust to continue the work of restoring and conserving the Sherwood Forest Area. "To be able to see Sherwood Forest in such great detail from the air is tremendously useful for managing the land. It gives us an instant and real life view of what is on the ground across hundreds of square kilometres. Changes in habitats are very evident from the air, so we can simply map these on screen. That will save us time and money so we can put more resources into restoration and conservation work and for that, we really appreciate Bluesky's help", says Norma Saunders, Programme Manager of the Sherwood Forest Trust. Historical Aerial Photography  Enfield Council - 23 May 2006 Bluesky has created a series of historic digital photomaps of Enfield that show how the area has changed over the last thirty years. Using Enfield Council's own archive of almost 1000 aerial prints, Bluesky has created three digital, map accurate datasets that will provide a valuable record of changes and developments since 1971. The digital photographs were orthorectified to place them into their true geographical position and 'stitched' together to form a seamless, map accurate dataset. Supplied ready for use in Enfield's Intranet based Geographical Information System (GIS), the photomaps will complement more recent aerial photographic surveys and other council datasets. "Although the historic surveys were a well used and valuable source of information, accessing them was time and labour intensive," said Mapping Officer, Brian Wright. "By creating digital versions of the surveys we will be able to integrate them within our corporate GIS providing desktop access to the information for users throughout the organisation." The original aerial surveys, flown in 1971, 1981 and 1991, were all previously held as hardcopy photographic prints and were primarily used to provide evidence of previous land use and property development. Users at the Council had to consult the flight plan of the original survey in order to identify which print covered their area of interest. The individual print was then studied 'in situ' or scanned for use at a later date. Historical Aerial Photography
British Nuclear Group - 30th June 2005 Project Services Ltd., part of the British Nuclear Group, is using aerial photographs from the 1940s to manage, control and assess nuclear licensed sites prior to their development. The historic images are to be used in conjunction with current day aerial photography for all UK sites managed and operated by Reactor Sites Ltd. (part of British Nuclear Group). The digital imagery is being used within Project Service's corporate Geographical Information System (GIS) running across the company's intranet to provide staff with access to detailed site information. As the nuclear industry faces the challenges of ongoing power generation, decommissioning and clean-up, site management today and for future generations has been brought into sharp focus. Project Services' new system will be made available to staff to provide a valuable asset management tool. It uses the power of GIS to allow users to select a site and even individual features (e.g. buildings, services, tunnels) visually and then drill down to layers of further information. The historical aerial photography, taken from the RAF's nationwide survey flown in 1946-7, provides valuable contextual information about each site showing, for example, where streams and drainage channels used to run before canalisation. The current aerial photography provides the modern day context enabling users to see what is actually on the ground rather than a series of building outlines provided by maps and plans. Past and present natural features continue to be important both to day-to-day site management and future development. "As we develop and make our GIS available to more and more of our staff they will be able to view an aerial photograph of a particular site, look at site plans or maps and then click on a particular building, sampling point or manhole to drill down to the detailed information they require. This might be anything from a pipe run or a photo of a particular valve," said Stewart Wragg (GIS Project Manager) at Project Services. "The aerial photography puts each site in its true context both historically because the RAF data was flown before each site was developed and in its modern day surroundings," continued Wragg. Historical Aerial PhotographyBoundary Disputes - NEWS AND FACTS - this month, Boundary disputes by John Maynard FRICS Far more boundary disputes occur between the owners of two residential properties than between commercial or agricultural neighbours. A typical boundary dispute will be influenced by a variety of factors, some of them technical, some of them socio-legal, some of them psychological. Technical factors include: - legal arguments as to whether adverse possession affects the case; - arguments as to whether certain legal presumptions (such as the hedge and ditch presumption) affect the case; - downright poor descriptions of the boundaries. I shall pass over the legal arguments and concentrate on boundary descriptions. Boundary descriptions can be expressed in words or they can be map-based. There is a good reason as to why so many boundaries are so badly described, and it is down to cost. Describing a boundary in words is extremely difficult, and only a land surveyor would know and understand all of the things that should be included in such a description. Describing a boundary in a picture (ie. a map) is relatively easy - for a land surveyor. The trouble is that it costs money to hire the services of a land surveyor to draft or draw what is seen as only a minor part of a conveyance deed, and conveyancing is already seen as expensive enough. So vendors and purchasers have traditionally saved themselves money by relying on inadequate boundary descriptions. Some boundary descriptions rely entirely on drawings, others include dimensions to supplement the drawings. Here are the problems that are all too common. Dimensions: Lawyers are accustomed to the notion that maps and plans are not always as accurate as we would like them to be. Lawyers and landowners seem to have a blind spot over the accuracy of dimensions: the thinking appears to be that the dimensions are stated in black and white in a deed so therefore they must be right. I have many reservations over a list of dimensions.
To illustrate how significant these discrepancies can be: one case I worked on in Kent involved a dimension that told me the piece of land was 106 feet wide. The land was steeply sloping, and if that dimension was a slope distance, then the plan (or horizontal) distance was only 98 feet 6 inches. Another problem with dimensions is that they never seem to be given with sufficient information to unambiguously define the boundary. For example, if you give me a set of three dimensions then you are unambiguously defining the size and shape of a triangle (but not its position on the earth's surface). I have yet to come across a property that is a simple triangle. Most pieces of land have four, or many more, sides. Give me a larger set of dimensions (than the three sides of a triangle) and you are defining nothing. A further problem with dimensions arises when the deeds state the length of a curve or of a sinuous line. Such a dimension is impossible to set out on the ground. Maps and plans: A wide range of types of plan has been pressed into use as conveyance plans. In the ideal world a conveyance plan should be at a large scale (preferably at 1:500 or at the even larger 1:250 or 1:200 scale) and should show what was actually built. I understand that conveyance plans based on such as-built surveys do exist but I have yet to see one. Here is a list of the types of conveyance plan that I do come across and of what can be wrong with each of them. Copies of Ordnance Survey maps or of Land Registry plans. Land Registry plans are of course essentially just copies of Ordnance Survey maps. There are references to the accuracy of Ordnance Survey mapping elsewhere on this page. The important thing to repeat here is that Ordnance Survey maps show the physical features that their surveyors encountered and that their surveyors do not make enquiries as to where property boundaries are. So Ordnance Survey maps do not show property boundaries and skilful map interpretation is needed to reconcile the information from the conveyance plan with what one finds on the ground. Tracings of Ordnance Survey maps. A lot of conveyance plans from the first half of the twentieth century are clearly tracings made from Ordnance Survey maps. If one has to worry about the accuracy of the original Ordnance Survey map, then a tracing made from it can only contain even more inaccuracy. Developers' layout plans. Before a green (or brown) field site becomes a housing estate it is necessary for an architect to make detailed drawings showing where all the roads, underground services, houses, and fences will go, and where the preserved trees will be allowed to remain. To save on cost, these same drawings will be used as the basis of the conveyance plans for the individual houses and their appurtenant land. The trouble is that the roads and underground services may have had to take slightly different routes, with the result that the houses had to be built in slightly different places, which meant that the fences went up in places other than the architect had in mind. The end result is that the conveyance plan (ie. the layout plan) bears little resemblance to what was actually built on the land. Sketch plans - The very name warns of their likely inaccuracy. Socio-legal factors Another important factor in boundary disputes is the lack, in English law, of a concept of theft of land. Plants, statues, paving stones, parked cars, and almost anything else including the soil itself, may be stolen from your land, but the land itself cannot be stolen. Land can be possessed by someone other than the rightful owner, and if that possession is adverse to the interests of the rightful owner then the adverse possessor may eventually become the rightful owner. But if the rightful owner wins a civil case to recover his land, then the adverse possessor does not gain a criminal conviction for theft and cannot be sent to prison (unless of course he has demonstrated a contempt of court during the course of the trial). The prospect of an adverse possessor being rewarded with the title to the land he is claiming is an encouragement to squatters. The lack of sanction of a failed adverse possession, by means of a criminal record and a prison sentence, means there is no deterrent against squatters. Another factor is the lack of intermediate legal processes that might defuse a boundary dispute and prevent it from escalating. A surveyor might at an early stage give his professional opinion as to where the boundary is, but it is only an opinion and does not carry any force of law. The surveyor does not have powers similar to those of a policeman who may intervene in a potential civil unrest to ensure that no breach of the peace or riot ensues. A fourth factor is a lack of take-up of alternative means of dispute resolution that fall short of taking the matter to the county court. There are mediators willing, via a process of shuttle diplomacy, to facilitate a negotiated settlement between disputing neighbours, but their services are too infrequently used in the resolution of boundary disputes. There are adjudicators who will make impartial decisions as to the position of the boundary based on the evidence presented to them, but they are again infrequently used in the resolution of boundary disputes. It remains to be seen whether the new post of Adjudicator to HM Land Registry, set up by the Land Registration Act 2002, will provide an acceptable alternative means of resolving boundary disputes. Psychological factors One such psychological factor is greed. An example is a new owner who, only after moving into the house he has bought, notices that the fence is nearer to the side of his house than the conveyance plan shows it. Instead of accepting that he bought the land contained within the fence (which is the land that he was shown and was identified to him at the time he viewed the house), he presses a claim against his unwitting neighbour for the 'return' to him of land that he did not purchase in the first place. The next example may also be described as greed although it could also be properly described as a pseudo-boundary dispute. It involves the landowner who desires to build an extension, garage, driveway or whatever along the side of his house but discovers there is insufficient room and fabricates a boundary dispute in order to manufacture the space demanded by his plans. Another psychological factor is an arrogant disdain for the rights of the neighbour. It is quite possible to successfully press an unwarranted case against a neighbour who you know is not prepared to countenance the costs involved in defending his rights in court. If only there was a civil equivalent of the Crown Prosecution Service! The two most powerful psychological factors are an emotive quest for justice and a determination by the injured party not to allow the neighbour to 'get one over'. When these operate together they provide an unstoppable momentum to see the matter through to the county court, no matter how long it takes, no matter how upsetting the process is, and no matter how much it costs. A better way Other countries have other systems of land registration that tend to rely heavily on the accurate mapping, recording and the physical marking on the ground of boundaries. To change our system to a similar model would be inordinately expensive. It would also be more expensive to run and maintain, and whilst there might be fewer opportunities for boundary disputes, no system can be proof against boundary disputes. Within the present system we can do nothing about the totally inadequate boundary descriptions in the deeds of existing properties. For new properties, Land Registry is trying to persuade developers of the wisdom of doing as-built surveys for use as conveyance plans. If developers used as-built surveys to register 'determined boundaries' for the new properties then (so the thinking goes) these new houses could be marketed as being proof against future boundary disputes - and such a marketing advantage should provide enough incentive for the developers to abandon their practice of re-using layout plans for conveyancing. I haven't noticed any advertisements boasting boundary-dispute-proof housing, so perhaps it should be made a legal requirement for developers to carry out as-built surveys and to use these for conveyancing and land registration. Within the present system, professional advisors can at an early stage encourage the protagonists to take a more rational view of the dispute and to look at it in more economic terms. If clients and their neighbours can be persuaded at an early stage to commit to an amicable agreement or to mediation or arbitration, then considerable time, anguish and expense can be saved, Compare such a situation with an admittedly stereotypical boundary dispute between residential neighbours and the advantages are obvious: but it requires that both neighbours are convinced of the benefits for it to work. In the stereotypical boundary dispute between residential properties both parties stand on their principles, engage solicitors, obtain surveyors' reports, instruct barristers and go to court. The process can take three of four agonising years in which the anxiety may well make at least one of the protagonist very ill. The whole process will cost as much as the protagonists feel compelled to spend, typically between £25,000 and £50,000 each side. At the end of the day, one of the parties is going to lose the case and is likely to be ordered to pay a substantial proportion of the other party's costs. And all for a narrow strip of land that is probably worth only £1,000. Contrast this with the stereotypical boundary dispute between two large commercial companies. For operational reasons they cannot contemplate the whole process lasting more than a few weeks. They will also want to minimise the effect of the dispute on their respective company's bottom line. Their boards will therefore take managerial decisions that minimise the time and cost elements of finding a workable solution to the dispute. |
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