Dataset: National Forest and Sparse Woody Vegetation Data (Version 8.0 - 2023 Release)

Description

Landsat satellite imagery is used to derive woody vegetation extent products that discriminate between forest, sparse woody and non-woody land cover across a time series from 1988 to 2023. A forest is defined as woody vegetation with a minimum 20 per cent canopy cover, at least 2 metres high and a minimum area of 0.2 hectares. Note that this product is not filtered to the 0.2ha criteria for forest to allow for flexibility in different use cases. Filtering to remove areas less than 0.2ha is undertaken in downstream processing for the purposes of Australia's National Inventory Reports. Sparse woody is defined as woody vegetation with a canopy cover between 5-19 per cent.

The three-class classification (forest, sparse woody and non-woody) supersedes the two-class classification (forest and non-forest) from 2016. The new classification is produced using the same approach in terms of time series processing (conditional probability networks) as the two-class method, to detect woody vegetation cover. The three-class algorithm better encompasses the different types of woody vegetation across the Australian landscape.

Unlike previous versions of the National Forest and Sparse Woody Vegetation data releases where 35 tiles have been released as part of the product, only the 25 southern tiles have been supplied in this release. The 10 northern tiles will be released as a separate product release, expected later in the financial year, as these are subject to a methodological change associated with the adoption of the Sentinel sensor and will be supplied at a different resolution. Please see the National Forest and Sparse Woody Vegetation data metadata pdf (Version 8.0 - 2023 release) for more information.

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