2020–21 SLATS Report
Introduction
Overview—Mapping and monitoring woody vegetation ecosystems
With an area of approximately 173 million hectares, Queensland is the second largest state in Australia. It is nearly five times the size of Japan and seven times the size of Great Britain. It is home to diverse flora and fauna due to its unique habitats which include extensive arid and semi-arid rangelands, and temperate, sub-tropical and tropical environments.
Queensland has more than 1,400 regional ecosystems with the majority of these described as woody regional ecosystems. These woody regional ecosystems include the sparse and very sparse shrublands and woodlands of the extensive arid and semi-arid rangelands, and the sparse woodlands and mid-dense and dense forests and rainforests along the Great Dividing Range, coastal plains, and in the Cape York Peninsula and Wet Tropics bioregions. These ecosystems play a critical role in supporting biodiversity, maintaining landscape function and water quality, supporting agricultural production, sequestering and storing atmospheric carbon dioxide, and providing recreation and natural amenity. To conserve, protect, and sustainably use these ecosystems in a changing climate, it is essential to have spatial and temporal data and information to characterise their composition and structure and to monitor their dynamics.
In Queensland, the regional ecosystems framework provides the basis for describing the vegetation types and their remnant status. The Statewide Landcover and Trees Study (SLATS) monitors woody vegetation extent, and changes to that extent due to clearing and regrowth, using Sentinel-2 satellite imagery as its primary monitoring tool. A Spatial BioCondition framework has also been developed to characterise and map the condition of the state’s regional ecosystems. Combined, these initiatives provide a spatially and temporally comprehensive account of Queensland’s ecosystems based on peer-reviewed science.
About this report
The current series of SLATS reporting monitors and reports change in woody vegetation extent against a woody extent baseline, first introduced in 2018 and updated annually based on mapping of woody vegetation clearing and regrowth. Additional scientific approaches have also been developed to attribute the degree of modification associated with the clearing activity and to provide estimates of woody vegetation density and age since disturbance, that is, when the vegetation was last disturbed or began to regrow following a disturbance event. These approaches aim to better describe the woody vegetation that currently exists, and where and how its extent is changing.
The 2020–21 SLATS report is nominally for the period August 2020 to August 2021. Regional summary data for bioregions are also included. The 2020–21 report and data are directly comparable with the 2018–19 report and 2019–20 report. However, they are not comparable with previous SLATS reports up to and including 2017–18 due to a change in methodology.
It is important to note that clearing activity mapped by SLATS in remnant and high-value regrowth areas does not always result in a conversion to non-remnant. The Queensland Herbarium uses SLATS data to inform remnant and high-value regrowth updates as part of regular regional ecosystem updates. These updates consider the clearing activity as well as a range of other criteria associated with the regional ecosystem mapping methodology, including the remnant and high-value regrowth definitions. For data and information on change in remnant vegetation, visit Remnant regional ecosystem vegetation in Queensland.
Note: There may be slight differences in the reported area figures compared with areas derived from the published SLATS spatial data. This is due to differences in the way the areas are represented in published SLATS vector data sets (i.e. data is represented in a polygon format) compared with raster data sets (i.e. data represented in a grid format) which are used for reporting. For the same reason, there may also be slight differences between figures stated in the SLATS 2020–21 report and the figures provided in the SLATS vegetation management analysis. Also, due to re-processing and some rounding, previously reported figures may differ slightly to figures and data files provided with the 2020–21 report.
In this guide: