Western NSW refugia collection

This page contains links to spatial layers that can be used to identify potential refugia in the arid and semi-arid region of western New South Wales, Australia. The layers were derived from Landsat data and the SRTM DEM. The layers and how they can be used are described in detail in a forthcoming publication (Gill et al 2015).

The layers are:

Green accumulation index and green-feature classes
Water count and water prevalence classes
Woody extent and foliage projective cover (See Armston et al 2009, Kitchen et al 2010)
Topographic layers: topographic roughness, topographic position, cold-air drainage (after Ashcroft and Gollan, 2011). See also https://data.tern.org.au/rs/public/data/dem/derived/nsw/.

Abstract from Gill et al (in review):

"The existence of vertebrate species in Australia’s arid and semi-arid interior is threatened by a future of more frequent and prolonged periods of hot, dry weather. So land managers in the region must identify and conserve refugia. But they can only assess a small number of sites on the ground because the area is remote, most places are difficult to access, and they are constrained by resources. Our intention was to create spatial layers to assist land managers find potential refugia, at the property scale, using desktop analyses prior to on-ground surveys. Land managers may also use the layers as evidence to justify the investment decisions to conserve the chosen sites."

References

Armston, J.D., Denham, R., Danaher, T., Scarth, P., Moffiet, T.N., 2009. Prediction and validation of foliage projective cover from Landsat-5 TM and Landsat-7 ETM+ imagery. Journal of Applied Remote Sensing vol. 3, no. 1, 033540. doi:10.1117/1.3216031

Ashcroft, M.B., Gollan, J.R., 2011. Fine-resolution (25 m) topoclimatic grids of near-surface (5 cm) extreme temperatures and humidities across various habitats in a large (200 × 300 km) and diverse region. International Journal of Climatology, vol. 32, no. 14, pp. 2134-2148. doi:10.1002/joc.2428

Gill T., Horn G., Collerton H., Grant R., Hanson A. and Flood N. 2015. Identification of refugia in Western NSW in: Proceedings of the Australian Rangeland Society's 18th Biennial Conference 2015 Alice Springs, Australia. https://rangelandsgateway.org/sites/default/files/2021-01/9.03._Gill_et_al.pdf

Kitchen, J., Armston, J., Clark, A., Danaher, T., Scarth, P., 2010. Operational use of annual Landsat-5 TM and Landsat-7 ETM+ image time series for mapping wooded extent and foliage projective cover in north-eastern Australia, in: 15th Annual Australasian Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Conference. Darwin, Australia.