Wetland Management Tools & Techniques
New South Wales Vegetation Classification and Assessment
August 2006
The NSW Vegetation Classification and Assessment (NSWVCA) project aims to classify the native vegetation of New South Wales into vegetation communities. The area to be covered is about 80 million hectares distributed across 18 IBRA bioregions.
Project Progress
The State has been divided into four geographical sections, and the project has commenced in the mainly arid and semi-arid Western Plains (completed). The project will move eastwards to the Western Slopes (some work completed), the Tablelands and finally the biologically complex Escarpment and Coast. It is estimated that between 800 and 1200 plant communities will be described in total.
The introduction to the project and the Western Plains work is published in Volume 9(3) 2006 Cunninghamia, available from the Botanic Gardens Trust.
The Introduction paper provides an overview of vegetation classification and mapping internationally, in Australia and in NSW, and describes the methods used in the NSWVCA project. It includes descriptions of the vegetation classification database. Protected areas in NSW are assessed, outlining threat criteria and threat processes applicable to plant communities, and extending previous threat category definitions of ecological communities.
The second paper classifies and assesses the status of 213 plant communities in the NSW Western Plains (the western 57%, or 45 million hectares, of NSW). Besides describing the communities with 90 attributes (including species, soils, landforms and distribution), statistics are provided on their threat- and protected area status, 71 are considered to be threatened, 80 are least concern and very few have more than 10% of their pre-European extent represented in protected areas. Western NSW remains poorly sampled in the protected area system compared to the eastern half of NSW but recent reserve additions have markedly increased sampling of some of the communities. The statistics in this paper provide a rational basis for further planning in reserve selection, off-reserve programs, prioritisation for PVP payments to farmers, catchment planning and environmental assessment.
Data Collected for Each Plant Community
Each plant community is being recorded on an MS Access database with 90 fields of information. These fields include a list of characteristic species, vegetation structure, common name, scientific name, general description and a photograph, distribution by bioregions, local government area and other regions, soils and substrate, list of threatening processes, comments on condition, fire regimes if known, a IUCN-like threat code using criteria about remaining extent and condition, a protected area code based on relative extent protected in reserves or secure property agreements.
Anticipated uses of the NSWVCA include:
- selecting new protected areas
- guiding incentive payments and land use decisions in the property vegetation planning process
- site assessment in environmental impact assessments
- assisting with State and Commonwealth nominations and definitions of threatened ecological communities
- prioritizing CMA and other regional targets for the protection and restoration of vegetation
- assisting in public and tertiary sector education about native vegetation
The longer-term aim of the project is to provide a standard framework for:
- future data collection (to ensure comparability)
- the systematised recording of future (including competing or superseding) classifications and mapping units
- accommodation of new data in relation to floristics, community extent, conservation status, and the full range of other data elements (90 fields in total).
For further information see: http://www.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au
