Estimating local variations in land use statistics

The Scottish agricultural census provides land use statistics as summaries for parish areas. We investigated the dis-aggregation of these parish summaries using the Land Capability for Agriculture and the 1988 Land Cover of Scotland as supporting data sets. It is unlikely that allocation rules to implement the dis-aggregation should be identical across all parishes. Equally, rules for individual parishes are indeterminate. The 891 parishes were classified into nine classes, then each class was regionalised, creating 91 regions overall. Allocation rules were estimated independently for each region and class. Statistical testing identified greater variations in the rules than is expected by random allocation of regions to classes.