2021–22 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. These approaches aim to better describe the woody vegetation that currently exists, and where and how its extent is changing.
The 2021–22 SLATS reporting period is nominally from August 2021 to August 2022. A range of data summaries which analyse the clearing and regrowth data with other key data sets of interest are presented in the report. Regional summary data for bioregions are also included.
The 2021–22 SLATS report and data are directly comparable with SLATS reports published from 2018–19 onwards. Published SLATS reports for reporting periods up to and including 2017–18 are not comparable with reports published from 2018-19 onwards, due to a change in methodology.
It is important to note that clearing activity mapped in remnant and high-value regrowth areas does not always result in a conversion to non-remnant. The Queensland Herbarium and Biodiversity Sciences 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 minor differences between SLATS reports and associated open data for the following reasons:
- Woody vegetation change figures from previous SLATS reports that are included in this report are accessed directly from SLATS open data files. Due to rounding, woody vegetation change figures in this report and their associated open data files may have minor differences in summed totals to those previously published.
- For reporting, SLATS data in vector format (i.e. polygons) is converted to raster format (i.e. grid). This conversion can lead to slight differences in measured areas. For the same reason, there may also be slight differences between figures stated in SLATS reports and the figures provided in the SLATS vegetation management analysis which uses the SLATS data in vector format for its analysis.
- Re-processing of the woody vegetation extent at the conclusion of each SLATS monitoring period to incorporate the new clearing and regrowth mapping data can lead to minor differences between previously reported figures and figures presented in this report. This is mostly due to data filtering and cleansing operations, as well as the conversion of the data to raster for reporting. This difference can be most apparent in the transaction summaries where the woody vegetation extent closing balance of the previous monitoring period may not be identical to the opening balance of the current monitoring period. These differences equate to a fraction of one percent difference in the total extent of woody vegetation in Queensland that is estimated by SLATS.
In this guide: