National scale maps of parent material properties, terrain and soil natural capital units at 50 metre resolution for Great Britain, 2020

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Environmental Information Data Centre
Last updated:
14 May 2026
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Not added
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None

Summary

This dataset contains national scale maps on several characteristics of soils and landscapes across Great Britain, circa 2020. Key soil parent material categories featured here include texture, drainage, depth, organic matter and calcium carbonate contents. Terrain information includes landform classes, topographic wetness index, and indices of valley bottom flatness and ridge top flatness. Our maps were derived from components of the BGS's Depth to Groundwater and Parent Material Models, digital maps of soil organic carbon content and peat extent, locations of landfill and quarry sites from Open Street Map, and the OS Terrain 50 digital terrain model. The collated third-party datasets were modified to produce a mini data cube of several derived map layers, that were then combined to produce a map of 13 soil natural capital units The maps can be used either individually or collectively to support soil health assessment, to train land cover classification and digital soil mapping algorithms, and modelling of ecosystem services. The full dataset includes 9 raster gridded maps at 50 x 50 metre resolution, with full coverage of England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland was excluded due to a lack of accessible third-party data which we could apply our classification framework to. Our dataset is considered to be representative of soils and landscapes as of the year 2020, based on the maps of soil organic carbon content and locations of quarries and landfills we used. However, it should be stressed that several soil properties, including texture, depth, calcium carbonate contents and drainage reflect much longer-term conditions. Full details about this dataset can be found at https://doi.org/10.5285/5bcd927d-8114-4937-af7e-258cfd137109

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Added to data.gov.uk
2026-05-11
Access contraints
Any product derived from or incorporating the Data must be accompanied by an acknowledgment of the source by using the following statements: Contains data derived from British Geological Survey materials [Soil Parent Material Dataset © UKRI 2021] and [Depth to Groundwater Dataset © NERC 2014]. Contains data derived from OS data (OS Terrain 50) © Crown Copyright [and database right] (2022). Contains derived data from soil organic carbon concentration maps in the EcoDataCube database © Copyright OpenGeoHub & CVUT Prague & mundialis & Terrasigna & MultiOne 2020-2022. Contains data on quarry and dump locations derived from OpenStreetMap © OpenStreetMap contributors (2022). The GB peatlands map contains data derived separately for Wales, England and Scotland (2017 © Crown copyright: Welsh Government, © Natural Resources Wales and Database Right. All rights Reserved; Derived in part from British Geological Survey geology data 1:50,000 scale. BGS © UKRI, NATMAP © Cranfield University, © James Hutton Institute, and OS data © Crown copyright and database right).
Harvest GUID
5bcd927d-8114-4937-af7e-258cfd137109
Extent
Latitude: 60.861° to °
Longitude: -8.648° to 1.768°
Spatial reference system
Dataset reference date
2026-03-26 (publication)
Frequency of update
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(pointOfContact, author, owner, publisher, custodian)
ISO 19139 resource type
dataset
Metadata language
eng
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