The Avon Native Vegetation Map Project Department of Environment and Conservation The Wheatbelt NRM June, 2011 The Avon Native Vegetation Map Project , June 2011 [The map layer and vegetation attribute outputs from this project can be viewed in the DEC NatureMap website .] ANVMP contributors were: Ben Bayliss - Source map interpretation, spatial data capture (GIS), NVIS vegetation attribute interpretation; Brett Glossop - Database development and NVIS data structure interpretation for the ANVMP; Paul Gioia - Naturemap website applications; Jane Hogben - Source map digitisation, GIS; Ann Rick – reinterpretation of Lake Campion vegetation mapping to NVIS criteria. Jeff Richardson - Avon Terrestrial Baseline ND 001 program Coordinating Ecologist. Tim Gamblin - Avon Terrestrial Baseline ND 001 Technical Officer. USE OF THIS REPORT Information used in this report may be copied or reproduced for study, research or educational purposes, subject to inclusion of acknowledgement of the source. 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CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...................................................................................................................................2 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................................2 PROJECT SCOPE ............................................................................................................................................2 Project Area ........................................................................................................................................3 PROJECT OUTPUTS ........................................................................................................................................3 PROJECT DATA SCOPING ................................................................................................................................3 Data Sources .......................................................................................................................................3 Data Variability...................................................................................................................................4 PROJECT METHODS .......................................................................................................................................6 Spatial Data Incorporation..................................................................................................................7 Vegetation Data Attribution ...............................................................................................................9 Taxon nomenclature and currency ...................................................................................................12 Databasing........................................................................................................................................12 REFERENCES ..............................................................................................................................................13 AVON NATIVE VEGETATION MAP PROJECT SOURCE DOCUMENTS ........................................................................14 APPENDIX 1: THE VEGETATION MAPPING PROCESS ...........................................................................................17 APPENDIX 2: VEGETATION ATTRIBUTES AND MAP UNIT CORRELATION .................................................................18 Attribution example: map 286_089..................................................................................................18 Mosaics and Multiattribution ...........................................................................................................22 APPENDIX 3: NVIS, SUMMARY OF GENERAL CONCEPTS AND DESCRIPTION CODING ................................................24 The NVIS Hierarchy: ..........................................................................................................................24 NVIS Description Codes .....................................................................................................................28 NVIS Tables: ......................................................................................................................................30 APPENDIX 4: VEGETATION CLASSIFICATION ......................................................................................................33 Structural Categories ........................................................................................................................34 References:........................................................................................................................................39 APPENDIX 5: DOMINANCE ............................................................................................................................40 Stratum .............................................................................................................................................40 APPENDIX 6: DATA STRUCTURE ....................................................................................................................44 Polygon multiattributes and web-based applications (Naturemap).................................................44 APPENDIX 7: NVIS ATTRIBUTE LIST ................................................................................................................47 APPENDIX 8: COMPARISON OF MUIR AND NVIS CLASSIFICATIONS ....................................................................177 Acknowledgements The Avon Native Vegetation Map Project was an initiative of the ND001 Avon Baselining program carried out under the Science Applications Program, Science Division within the Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) and funded by the Wheatbelt NRM (formerly Avon Catchment Council). The following people are acknowledged for their valuable support: Judith Harvey, Research Scientist, Woodland Benchmarking Project, Science Applications Program; Greg Keighery Senior Principal Research Scientist, Science Division, DEC; Rebecca Palumbo Program Manager, Biodiversity, Wheatbelt NRM Inc. Steve Rowlands, Shane French and colleagues, Geographic Information Services, DEC. Brett Beecham, Regional Ecologist, Wheatbelt Region, DEC. WWF and Greening Australia, WA are gratefully acknowledged for their valuable input and support for the ANVMP project as well as contribution to project workshops. Also there were many others within and outside DEC whose time, knowledge, comments and feedback have been greatly appreciated. Introduction The Baselining Project is one of the natural diversity projects funded largely by the federal government through the Wheatbelt Natural Resource Management, NRM (formerly Avon Catchment Council, ACC). The Project’s primary purpose is to collate the biodiversity data and interpret these data to support other projects in the Wheatbelt NRM biodiversity theme. A preliminary role of the Baselining project was to identify key knowledge and operational gaps in natural diversity conservation within the Wheatbelt NRM region. One of these key knowledge gaps concerned the lack of appropriately scaled native vegetation mapping available for supporting natural diversity conservation across the Wheatbelt NRM region, (Richardson and Gamblin, 2009). Beard’s 1:250,000 Vegetation Associations and Beards and Hopkins 1:100,000 System Association mapping has been the main source of regional vegetation map coverage available for WA wheatbelt natural resource management. At such scales the vegetation associations mapped are too broad to account for the fine scale variations in vegetation (Harvey et al 2012). It was highlighted by Richardson and Gamblin (2009), that whilst invaluable as a synopsis of pre-European extent, Beard’s coverage was too coarse for appropriately informing the kinds of issues encountered at the scale of existing vegetation remnants. This deficiency of appropriately scaled map information was also identified as a constraint to vegetation management in the Northern Agricultural NRM Region (DEC, 2008). The existence of many separate and largely unpublished but potentially finer-scaled vegetation map documents related to the Avon NRM region raised the possibility of developing a combined resource that could help resolve this vegetation knowledge gap. Project Scope To be useful, any source maps needed to be integrated with a standardised set of vegetation attributes in a framework that allowed the data to be easily accessed, viewed, queried spatially as well as stored and managed as a coherent entity. In other words what was required was: o A single georeferenced spatial layer i.e. in a Geographic Information System (GIS)dataset o A set of corresponding standardised vegetation attributes. o A basis for querying data as a set of equivalent vegetation attributes. The currency, methods and scale of source mapping available for the Avon region varied considerably. The earliest sources represented a series of extensive wheatbelt surveys