RPA Crop Map of England features and events Ground Observation Points 2024

The RPA Ground Observation Points (GOP) is a point dataset, that represents the location of observations made by surveyors in a sample of parcels and records the land cover according to set criteria. Over 11,000 locations were visited to assess the accuracy and maintain the quality of features in Crop map of England (CROME). In 2024, observations contain evidence of mowing and harvest events on grassland and arable lands respectively. The GOP dataset has been maintained by RPA Geospatial Services since 2015. Ground observation points are randomly distributed within 32 zones across England. RPA's GOP data collection policies now enables annual visit to the same locations and as such GOPs are mostly fixed with yearly updates to capture the operational needs of RPA. This could enable long-term monitoring of land use and help with training deep learning models.
The field surveys are carried out on RPA’s behalf by a contractor Cyient Europe Ltd. In previous years they have been acquired for both Control with Remote Sensing (CwRS) and for Commons Eligibility Mapping programmes that have been completed during the year. The points are attributed with: i) Parcel reference ID (as with RPA Parcel Points) ii) Crop or land cover observed to be / have been growing at that location iii) Farm / land management practices (Events) at that location iv) Date of observation v) Description of observation vi) Confirmation technique in current year vii) Confidence of observation and viii) Whether observations were made by RPA or an external client. There are no publicly available supporting photographs in this version. The Crop Map of England (CROME) is publicly available and has historically been used as part of CwRS for BPS. It is intended that releasing the ground observations would benefit research in automation, machine learning, and national food production system. RPA’s GOP use the Open Government Licence v3.0 as used by other publicly accessible data on the Defra Data Services Platform and would be updated approximately every year.