The Rural Payment Agency’s Ground Observation Points (GOP) is a point dataset that records observations of land cover and farm events on land parcels across rural England. Observations are made by surveyors acting on behalf of the RPA. More than 12,000 locations were visited. Internally the GOPs have been used for accuracy assessment of the Crop map of England (CROME) and for training event detection models which are relevant for monitoring of compliance for a selection of environmental land management schemes. In 2025, evidence of mowing, harvest and tilling events on grassland and arable lands were captured.
Ground observation points are randomly distributed in 32 zones across England. From 2024, the data collection policy was revised to enable annual revisit which means there is a significant overlap between successive years. This would enable long-term monitoring of land use and farm management strategies.
The field surveys are carried out on RPA’s behalf by Cyient Europe Ltd.
In previous years, GOPs were acquired for both Control with Remote Sensing (CwRS) and for Commons Eligibility Mapping programmes.
The points are attributed as follows: i) parcel reference ID ii) crop or land cover observed iii) farm / land management practices (events) iv) date of observation v) description of observation vi) confirmation technique in current year vii) confidence of observation and viii) collecting agency or company.
The RPA undertakes internal quality checks of ground observation points to maintain high data quality standards.
There are no publicly available supporting photographs in this version.
It is intended that releasing the ground observations would benefit research in environmental model development including machine learning as well as 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.
Attribution statement: © Rural Payments Agency copyright and/or database right 2024. All rights reserved.