Ecosystem condition for the Gunbower-Koondrook-Perricoota Forest Icon Site v03.04.2021

Brief description

The ecosystem condition data for the GKP region for 2010 and 2015 was developed at a 25m resolution to meet the requirements of the Land and Ecosystem Accounts Project (LEAP), to demonstrate a scalable approach to condition accounts under the UN SEEA EA framework. The spatial condition surface draws on two sources of information, expert-derived scores for ecosystem states defined under the Australian Ecosystem Models framework, and the remotely derived Habitat Condition Assessment System.

Updates since delivery of datasets on 01/12/2020
There has been an update in the datasets since delivery of the draft account-ready datasets on the 01/12/2020. Updates were informed by expert opinion provided in late February 2021 and resulted in a) a revised ecosystem extent classification, with a reduction in total wetland extent and a reduced number of unclassified pixels.
b) refinement of reference pixels in the GKP, and subsequent revision of the enhanced HCAS products prior to integration with expert opinion.
The effects of these changes is minor (approx. increase 0.01 condition score) relative to the 01/12/20 delivery.

Lineage: Expert scores were collected for each ecosystem state as defined in: Richards AE, Lucas R, Ware C, Clewley D, Prober SM, McInerney P and Schmidt RK (2021b) Account-ready data for extent of ecosystem types and condition states at Gunbower-Koondrook-Perricoota Forest Icon Site, v01.03.2021. A data collection from the Land and Ecosystem Accounts Project. CSIRO, Australia. https://data.csiro.au/collections/collection/CIcsiro:47814.

These atemporal data were combine with Habitat Condition Assessment System data with finer spatial and temporal resolution using a logistic scaling to provide a best estimate of ecosystem condition for 2010 and 2015.

More information on the Habitat Condition Assessment System (HCAS) version 2.1 base model is available at https://research.csiro.au/biodiversity-knowledge/projects/hcas/. HCAS addresses the need for nationally consistent, landscape-wide, fine-scale data on habitat condition for biodiversity, by providing gridded 250m pixel resolution products. The national dataset uses Earth observation data, site condition reference data and information about soils, climates and landforms to estimate the condition of terrestrial habitats in terms of their predicted capacity to support the wildlife expected there under reference conditions. This dataset, provided in this collection, was then reprojected to Albers Equal Area and bilinearly resampled to a 25 m pixel resolution to be compatible other datasets used in the development of the ecosystem accounts.

For this project, the version 2.1 base model was customised to incorporate expert knowledge available for the GKP region. Additional data provided by experts were used to calibrate a customised version of habitat condition within the defined state.