Water Presence and Persistence Across New South Wales 1988-2012

This dataset indicates the presence and persistence of water across New South Wales between 1988 and 2012. It contains two primary raster data products: water count and water prevalence, derived from Landsat time series imagery.

Use Cases

• Generate water masks for the NSW State-wide Landcover and Trees Study (SLATS) by removing non-vegetative features like water bodies.
• Model distance to locations of persistent water bodies as a contributing indicator for potential biodiversity refugia using water prevalence classes.
• Analyze the proportion of observations with water present (water count band 1) relative to total possible observations (water count band 2) for hydrological monitoring.
• Assess the relative persistence of water in the landscape using the 12 water prevalence classes derived from the water count product.

Strengths

• Provides a 25-year temporal coverage from 1 Jan 1988 to 31 Dec 2012.
• Includes two distinct analytical products: water count and water prevalence.
• Data is organized according to the Landsat satellite path/row grid system for spatial reference.

Limitations

• Data is temporally stale, with the time series ending in 2012.
• Observations can be obscured by cloud, cloud-shadow, steep slopes, and topographic shadow, leading to potential data gaps.
• The specific file formats (HTML, PNG, TXT, PDF) suggest the primary data may be packaged within documentation rather than as raw, easily processed raster files.

Provenance

Source

Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network's Data Discovery

Collection Method

Derived from Landsat time series imagery using water index and water masks for NSW (Danaher & Collett 2006).

Time Range

1988-01-01 to 2012-12-31

Freshness

The metadata was last updated in March 2026, but the underlying data time series ends in 2012.

Geography

New South Wales, Australia