Vegetation Mapping Pilot Project

Located in an area of Australia that is recognised for the diversity and importance of its natural surrounding, strategic plans and practices of vegetation management and protection are important issues in the Coffs Harbour City Council  (CHCC).
 
To contribute to a range of key Council tasks – including vegetation mapping, CHCC chose airborne LiDAR and multispectral aerial imagery from AAM to provide accurate data on the geographic features of the entire Coffs Harbour region.

These datasets have formed a major input to a vegetation mapping pilot project for an area covering the Coffs Harbour airport and Boambee Beach.

In addition to terrain data and imagery, the Council commissioned AAM to provide vegetation boundaries and vegetation structure data. This data was supplied in 370 tiles (2km x 2km each) in ESRI shapefile format. 35Gb of data! Some individual tiles were 262Mb in size and comprised over 200,000 polygons. One of the key features of the new files was their spatial accuracy of about 50cm - which is superior to the current mapping which can be misplaced up to 100m.

The LiDAR-derived vegetation data was classified into six vegetation structure classes: Tall Trees, Medium Trees, Low Trees, Tall Shrub, Low Shrub and Grasses – Ground. Although lacking floristic information, these vegetation classes have the potential to underpin a new generation of spatially refined vegetation mapping for the CHCC.

Due to the complexity of the project, the Council engaged the services of consultants to devise methodologies to simplify the data, extract vegetation boundaries and marry the existing vegetation study into a new dataset.

The consultants conducted a trial to reconcile the LiDAR-derived outputs generated for the Coffs Harbour Regional Airport lands with current Council vegetation mapping (ELA 2008) (refer images right). This trial explored the potential for simplifying complex LiDAR-derived data, while maintaining a satisfactory level of mapping resolution.

Once the new vegetation layer is fully derived, it will be used to update the following databases:
- Koala Plan of Management
- Fire Prone Lands Mapping
- Endangered Ecological Communities
- Vegetation Plan of Management

The new vegetation dataset will also be used for defining new habitat corridors of both local and regional significance.

To read the expanded case study, click here (PDF - 0.3MB).

For more information on LiDAR, click here.