There is something exciting about identifying your home in an aerial photograph and visualising how it slots into the surrounding area. The technology used today is so advanced that details such as garden pathways and fences can even be recognised. The instant connection with something that is so familiar makes them popular with the consumer market. However aerial maps also have a much greater use than hanging in a photo frame. A great tool for helping to monitor the changing trends of Britain's landscape, aerial mapping has brought a whole new meaning to the term bird's eye view. Aerial mapping over the past few years has revealed how British countryside is being slowly replaced by urbanisation. Concrete blocks now stand where lush green fields once existed and rising sea levels and the erosion of habitable land has greatly affected almost four hundred miles of coastline. Aerial maps are used regularly by environmentalists, developers and planning authorities, because unlike traditional maps, they provide a real time visualisation of what is on the ground. The finer details they provide have opened up tremendous opportunities to those studying the evolution of the urban and rural landscape, to reveal an unmistakable shift from conservation to development. It is thought that as much as thirty five thousand acres of countryside have become victim to the bulldozers path. With an expanding population, fears are rife that government plans for a greater growth in housing is to shred Britain of its traditional rural beauty. The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) claims urbanisation has got so out of hand that through expansion of housing, industry, traffic and airport construction the British countryside as we know it today may have totally disappeared over the next thirty years. If the growth of one hundred and fifty thousand new houses a year continues at the rate it currently is, Britain is at risk of becoming homogenous. A country where every town looks exactly the same. Twenty one square miles of countryside alone, an area the size of Southampton, is lost to development each year. At this rate, how can individual identity dominate? Aerial mapping allows specialists to monitor these advances to see how quickly the countryside is declining and how fast the cities are spreading. This can be done using a search and process service that lets the specialists locate historical photography of an area of particular interest and compare it to modern photography. Our lush green parks and meadows are not limitless resources and if we want our children and grandchildren to experience the beauty that is the English countryside, we need to hope that urbanisation doesn't totally destroy rural Britain as we know it today. With the help of aerial mapping we can at least keep track of the rapid changes and monitor the affects these changes are having on our countryside.
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