Geospatial AI for Land Use, by The Alan Turing Institute
Report by the Alan Turing Institute on geospatial AI in long-term land use decisions.
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The UK has finite land that is under increasing pressure. To meet our energy, housing, and food security needs, decision makers across the country will need to make significant choices about how we use our land. These choices need to be supported by the best possible evidence – underpinned by great spatial data and analysis.
In November 2022, the Alan Turing Institute began a partnership with the Geospatial Commission to develop a prototype decision support tool focused on spatial modelling for land use. This project explored how data science and AI could be used to support land use decision making, in collaboration with Newcastle City Council. The result was a prototype tool, DemoLand, which could suggest land use scenarios that would lead to desired outcomes. In December 2023, the Geospatial Commission and Turing extended its partnership to further develop DemoLand by introducing geospatial AI.
The Alan Turing Institute has documented their findings in this independent report, outlining the lessons they learned from the technical development of the tool and their extensive engagement with the land use modelling community on the potential for geospatial AI. It focuses on the role of satellite data and development of large language models.