Multi-tier archetypes to characterise British landscapes, farmland and farming practices

This dataset consists of landscape and agricultural management archetypes (1 km resolution) at three levels, defined by different opportunities for adaptation. Tier 1 archetypes quantify broad differences in soil, land cover and population across Great Britain, which cannot be readily influenced by the actions of land managers; Tier 2 archetypes capture more nuanced variations within farmland-dominated landscapes of Great Britain, over which land managers may have some degree of influence. Tier 3 archetypes are built at national levels for England and Wales and focus on socioeconomic and agro-ecological characteristics within farmland-dominated landscapes, characterising differences in farm management. The unavailability of several input variables for agricultural management prevented the generation of Tier 3 archetypes for Scotland.

The archetypes were derived by data-driven machine learning. The three tiers of archetypes were analysed separately and not as a nested structure (i.e. a single Tier 3 archetype can occur in more than one Tier 2 archetype), predominantly to ensure that archetype definitions were easily interpreted across tiers.