The Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)has gone out to tender with a contract for digital mapping services worth an estimated £15 million in total.

Primary business activities to be provided under the contract are based around the provision of a flexible workforce and use of remote sensing techniques for:

Controls, compliance and monitoring - Enforcing statutory environmental conditions and verifying subsidy scheme claims by remotely inspecting land through the use of computer aided photo interpretation (CAPI) and/ or machine learning techniques.

Land registration and digitising - Creation and maintenance of geospatial data products that are used as key controls or reference data against which subsidy scheme claims are cross-checked. Land registration service is administered by the Rural Payments Agency and the data is used extensively by Defra and outside the subsidy arena.

Services to be provided under the contract include:

• Imagery product creation - including orthorectification and pre-processing
• Ground truthing, collecting in situ data and rapid field visits
• Crop and vegetation classification
• Remote sensing inspection and controls - computer aided photo interpretation (CAPI)
• Digitising - Rural land registration data maintenance (land parcel data layer, land cover data layer, hedge control data layer)
• Quality Control

                - To provide quality trained resources that can be flexed up or down

                - Reporting of performance and quality using Management Information (MI)

                - Supplementary Business Analysis and IT support (Testing, Requirements input, Operational support, MI and performance monitoring)

• Geospatial consultancy to deliver proof of concepts and pilot studies to exploit advancements in technology and evolve the operation.

Deadline for responses is 24^th May 2021 – click here to access the contract notice documentation