Wikipedia:WikiProject Scottish Islands/Islands by area

WikiProject Scottish Islands

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This is an incomplete list of Scottish islands ranked by area.

Definitions

• An island is: "land that is surrounded by water on a daily basis, but not necessarily at all stages of the tide, excluding human devices such as bridges and causeways”.
• Bridged, tidal, loch and river islands are therefore included provided they meet the above definition.
• If there is doubt as to whether or not the land is an island, the Ordnance Survey is the principal reference for determining the extent of high tides.

Protocol for area measurement

1. Articles use the best reliable source available on a case-by-case basis.
2. For larger islands this is often Haswell-Smith (2004) and ideally this source is used for consistency.
3. For inhabited islands the next best reference is often General Register Office for Scotland (November 2003) Scotland's Census 2001 table.
4. Other useful sources are the ‘’Gazetteer of Scotland’’, which has academic credentials, and Rick Livingstone’s comprehensive tables, which are especially useful for smaller islands <40ha.
5. Occasionally another estimate from a credible external source may trump the others.
6. Estimates from Ordnance Survey maps may be used in the absence of other sources or if it is clear that a source includes an error.
7. The areas of tidal islands should be measured at a stage when they are "surrounded by seawater".

Protocol for ranking

1. Ranking is based primarily on Rick Livingstone’s tables, adjusted for amendments to measurements as agreed above.
2. 'Complex islands': an island may only appear on the list once and usually the smaller islands that appear at higher stages of the tide are used for ranking purposes.^{[Note 1]}

The area measurements should be per the article infoboxes, the relevant archipelago lists and List of islands of Scotland. As the sortable table at this last location creates a very long unnumbered list this table has been created to enable users of Template:Infobox Scottish island to determine the area ranks without having to count such a lengthy list. (Further details are available from Ben MacDui and Finavon who keep a main list on a more user friendly spreadsheet form.)

Only Haswell-Smith provides a ranked table (pp. 502-503) and a reconciliation with it for the largest 100 islands is provided below. Islands marked with an asterisk are not included on this list as he excludes bridged and tidal islands. Livingstone's tables are not ranked as such but easy to sort on a spreadsheet.

Caveat: for smaller islands estimating areas requires a consistency of approach, and none of the sources used provide an explicit reasoning. Thus, for islands such as Stromay, measuring at low tide will provide a quite different result from high tide and below about 70 ha the rankings are source dependent.

The rankings below show all islands >15ha. However, as the measurements for smaller islands are sometimes varied and re-numbering infoboxes can be time-consuming it is probably not desirable to add area ranks for islands <40 ha in area.
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