Aggregate Ecosystem Groups for the National Climate Risk Assessment

Brief description

For the National Climate Risk Assessment (NCRA), Australia’s ecosystems were divided into groups defined by their broad vegetation types. Referred to as “Aggregate Ecosystem Groups” or AEGs. These AEGs were determined by aggregating the National Vegetation Information System (NVIS) version 6.0 Major Vegetation Groups (Australian Government, Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEW)) into 18 groupings considered to have similar vegetation structure and compositional dominants, These 18 Groups are:

AEG_ID\tDESCRIPTION
1\tAcacia forests, woodlands and shrublands
2\tCallitris and other forests and woodlands
3\tCasuarina forests, woodlands and shrublands
4\tChenopod shrublands
5\tEucalypt forests
6\tEucalypt woodlands
7\tHummock grasslands
8\tMallee woodlands and shrublands
9\tMangroves and saltmarshes
10\tMelaleuca forests, woodlands and shrublands
11\tOther
12\tRainforests and vine thickets
13\tSedgelands and rushlands
14\tShrublands
15\tTussock grasslands
16\tOther terrestrial (forests, woodlands, shrublands, bare)
17\tInland Aquatic (freshwater, salt lakes, lagoons)
18\tSeas and estuaries
99\tunknown

These aggregations were applied to both the Pre-1750 and Existing input Major Vegetation Group data and are provided as GeoTIFFs in the same co-ordinate reference system and cell resolution as the source Major Vegetation Group input data, ie 100m GDA 1994 Australia Albers (EPSG 3577)

A vectorised version of the Existing (Present) AEGs is also provided as a shapefile in GCS WGS 1984 (EPSG 4326), used for regional spatial summarisation of raster data. Note the shapefile version does not differentiate AEGs 16, 17 and 18. These are included in the AEG 11 Other
Lineage: The Aggregate Ecosystem Groups are derived from the National Vegetation Information System (NVIS) version 6.0 Major Vegetation Groups (Australian Government, Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEW))

Major Vegetation Groups (MVGs) of broadly similar vegetation structure and compositional dominants were aggregated into 18 AEGs using ArcGIS Spatial Analyst Reclass by ASCII File Tool, using a remap table devised by the project team. Details of the MVG codes aggregated to AEGs are provided in the accompanying metadata document.