Habitat Condition Assessment Tool (HCAT) v3.0: Expert-derived ecosystem condition assessments for Australia (data collected July 2025-April 2026)

Full description

This collection comprises site-level ecosystem condition assessments collected through the Habitat Condition Assessment Tool (HCAT) between July 2025 and April 2026, applying the version 3.0 methodology (Munroe et al. 2025). The HCAT is a web-based platform hosted by the Atlas of Living Australia’s BioCollect information system that enables experts with deep ecological knowledge and field experience to contribute site-level ecosystem condition assessments (https://biocollect.ala.org.au/hcat/home/index, see Related Links).

Specifically, the data collection comprises:
•\tSite condition assessments (GeoPackage): A spatial data file Site_Condition_Assessments.gpkg containing polygon features representing individual site assessments, with associated attribute data including overall ecosystem condition scores, ecosystem characteristic scores, and assessment dates
•\tSite photographs (where provided): A collection of photographs associated with the site assessments, contributed optionally by experts. Not all sites have photos available
•\t Photo–site linking metadata: A metadata file (site_photos_attribute_data.csv) linking each site photo to its corresponding site and attribution information.

This collection contains 1,063 site condition assessments assessed between 2010 and 2025 and 735 associated site photographs. A data dictionary has also been provided, describing the contents and file structure of the collection (see Supporting files). It also provides a brief description of the methodology used to create this collection.

This data collection has been designed to provide expert-derived reference and modified ecosystem sites to support development, calibration and validation of model-based ecosystem condition assessments, such as the Habitat Condition Assessment System (HCAS; Valavi et al. 2026; Harwood et al. 2016, see Related Links), which integrates site-based observations with satellite remote sensing across entire continents, and ecosystem state-and-transition modelling based on the Australian Ecosystem Models Framework (Richards et al. 2020, see Related Links). The HCAT captures ecosystem condition across a continuum of intact to highly modified states, supporting a wide range of biodiversity research, natural resource planning, and environmental monitoring and reporting uses.

The HCAT data collection is ongoing – the tool remains open for contributions, and coverage of Australia’s ecosystems is expected to expand through future expert elicitation campaigns. Updates will be periodically published with recalibrated ecosystem condition scores including revised scaling factors, and new contributors and site assessments.

The HCAT v3.0 instructions guide provides a complete description of data elicitation methods, and can be cited as: Munroe S, Giljohann K, Brenton P, Williams KJ, Hosack G, Richards A, Brinkman J, Checksfield S, Salomon J, Raisbeck-Brown N, Warnick A, Dickson F, Pirzl R, Sinclair S and White M (2025) The Habitat Condition Assessment Tool: Instructions for participants, version 3.0. Publication EP2025-2633. CSIRO, Townsville, Australia. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25919/gkr9-cx03.

Lineage: The HCAT v3.0 method was used by contributors to generate the data in this collection. V3.0 builds on the earlier HCAT v1.0 method and pilot data collection (Pirzl et al. 2019; White et al. 2019; White et al. 2023), which demonstrated the feasibility of calibrating expert-derived ecosystem condition data using shared image assessments. The HCAT v3.0 method is a substantial refinement including improvements to scoring protocols, data capture workflows and calibration methods, informed by user feedback following the v1.0 pilot and ongoing research. Consequently, data collected under the HCAT v1.0 pilot are not directly comparable with the current collection. The HCAT v1.0 data remain available in White et al. (2019). An interim HCAT v2.0 method was tested but not adopted for data collection. Further refinements during method development led to the release of HCAT v3.0.

Data for this collection were collected between July 2025 and April 2026 (https://biocollect.ala.org.au/hcat/home/index; see Related Links). Contributors were recruited through a range of engagement channels, including scientific conferences, professional networks, workshops, targeted email invitations, and social media. Prior to contributing any data, participants were required to confirm they had read, understood and accept the privacy, IP and ethics arrangements for this project (see Research Participant Information Sheet in Related Links).

Site condition assessments were contributed via the HCAT v3.0 online platform. Experts were required to: i) delineate areas they are familiar with, ii) assign overall ecosystem condition scores on a continuous scale from 0 (completely transformed/removed ecosystem) to 1 (ecosystems with high integrity as it might have existed prior to European colonisation), iii) score key ecosystem characteristics (physical properties, species composition, structural diversity, and ecosystem function) and iv) optionally score anthropogenic drivers effecting ecosystem condition decline.

Experts were also required to complete an Image Assessment, which involved assigning overall ecosystem condition scores for a set of calibration images from the Australian Habitat Image Collection (Warnick et al. 2019; see Related Links). Image assessment data are used internally to calibrate site condition assessment scores across experts and locations (White et al. 2023; see Related Links).

The v3.0 data collection includes both the raw and calibrated ecosystem condition scores. Image assessment data are used internally to produce the rescaled ecosystem condition scores and are not published as part of this collection.

Contributors were asked to score Image and Site condition assessments intuitively, benchmarked against standardised definitions of ecosystem condition and guidance on relevant site-level attributes to consider when making their assessment (see The Habitat Condition Assessment Tool: Instructions for participants, version 3.0 in Related Links). The contributed data were reviewed for completeness and consistency and curated for publication.

This project has been approved by CSIRO’s Social Science Human Research Ethics Committee in accordance with the Australian National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (2007) updated 2023: ethics clearance 248/23 (participant selection and engagement) and 049/24 (expert elicitation). Intellectual property of contributed information remains with the participant. By registering and engaging in this process, the participant agreed that their contributed information would be made freely available, thereby allowing their information to be placed in the public domain via CSIRO’s Data Access Portal with a CC-BY International Licence for others to use without asking permission, with appropriate attribution. For more information on the risks and benefits of participation, and how participant privacy is protected, see the HCAT Research Participant Information Sheet in Related Links.