How Britain's mapmakers track climate change
Once used to defend Britain's shores against Napoleonic France, the Ordnance Survey's detailed maps are now essential for tracking and adapting to climate change.
Aerial photography is a remote sensing method that acquires overlapping vertical or oblique images from airborne platforms such as crewed aircraft, UAVs, or balloons for quantitative spatial analysis. It relies on calibrated cameras, controlled flight paths, and known imaging geometry to enable photogrammetric processing, including orthorectification, stereo viewing, and three-dimensional reconstruction of terrain and structures. In research, aerial photography supports mapping, land-use and land-cover classification, environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, and change detection, often serving as intermediate-resolution data between ground surveys and satellite imagery, and is frequently integrated with GPS/INS and ground control points to achieve high positional accuracy.
Once used to defend Britain's shores against Napoleonic France, the Ordnance Survey's detailed maps are now essential for tracking and adapting to climate change.
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