Urban Forest Canopy Coverage by Land Use and Height Strata

Urban Monitor data provides vegetation height strata areas for land parcels across multiple Australian years, including 2009, 2014, 2016, and 2018. The dataset calculates canopy coverage percentages and includes land use categories like Street Block, Parks, Roads, and Rural. Statistics are aggregated by mesh block and a concatenated MB_MonitorCategory field.

Use Cases

• Analyze total canopy coverage in square metres across different land use categories like Parks and Street Blocks.
• Model vegetation height strata distributions (0–3m, 3–8m, 8–15m, 15+m) aggregated by MB_MonitorCategory.
• Calculate canopy coverage percentages using the MBPercentage field for temporal comparisons between published years.
• Assess grass-covered area in the 0–50 cm range per land parcel for urban greening analysis.

Strengths

• Includes data for four distinct years (2009, 2014, 2016, 2018) enabling longitudinal urban forest analysis.
• Derived from high-resolution aerial imagery processed by CSIRO for the Urban Monitor mosaic.
• Categorizes parcels into seven specific land use types, including Street Block, Parks, Roads, and Water.

Limitations

• Aggregated mesh block boundaries and MBAreas may not match official ABS mesh block boundaries due to parcel centroid assignment.
• Parcel coverage for Urban Forest analysis varies between years, complicating direct comparisons without the MBPercentage field.

Provenance

Source

Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage, using parcel data from the 2016 Integrated Land Information Database (ILID).

Collection Method

Vegetation height strata and canopy coverage calculated from CSIRO's Urban Monitor mosaic based on Landgate aerial imagery.

Time Range

2009, 2014, 2016, 2018

Freshness

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Geography

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