ABSTRACT
Sources of information on primary activities in the UK are diverse and widely scattered. While there may appear to be many data sources, they tend to relate to either agriculture, forestry or fishing and there is no single comprehensive published source on primary land uses and activities. Still worse, existing data sources are often deficient in some way and tend to exclude information on important items, especially concerning recent changes in primary activities and the functional elements (i.e. processes at work) of land use. Very few sources permit a detailed analysis of spatial patterns and trends as they contain information at a broad national, or at best regional, scale. The following discussion thus examines the type of data sources available for each of the three major primary activities separately. It complements the material covered in Chapter 7 on rural land use.
