Abstract
There is an increasing emphasis in Australia on the use of vegetation condition information for regional conservation planning. The use of site-based vegetation condition assessments is a relatively mature management application with methods developed for different landscapes (e.g. rangelands and riparian) and to support a variety of natural resource management requirements (property vegetation planning or market-based instruments). On the other hand, the creation of regional-scale maps of native vegetation condition is still a developing methodology. This chapter argues that regional-scale maps of native vegetation condition are an important tool to complement site-based assessments. When combined they can provide a powerful integrated tool for regional conservation planning. Through a case study we describe a methodology for extending site-based data to maps of two vegetation condition attributes based on the BioMetric site assessment method. The case study, in the Murray Catchment in New South Wales, Australia, illustrates how an understanding of faunal response to native vegetation condition can be combined with modelled data to develop regional conservation planning maps. A spatial data aggregation approach is applied to model outcomes to address concerns about uncertainty and data confidentiality.
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Zerger, A., Gibbons, P., Seddon, J., Warren, G., Austin, M., Ryan, P. (2008). Native Vegetation Condition: Site to Regional Assessments. In: Pettit, C., Cartwright, W., Bishop, I., Lowell, K., Pullar, D., Duncan, D. (eds) Landscape Analysis and Visualisation. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69168-6_8
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