Vegetation Mapping Mosaic - Cessnock LGA. VIS ID 5122

The Department of Planning provides support to Local Government to enable evidence-based planning decisions. Biodiversity and Conservation Division collaborated with Cessnock City Council in 2021-2022 to deliver environmental map layers (Environmental Lands Study) that facilitate council’s review of their Local Environment Plan. This dataset is one of those and is a consolidated vegetation mosaic refined by an accurate and fine scale Woody Non-woody (WNW) layer to enhance the spatial accuracy of the data. An audit of existing vegetation products was conducted and 11 datasets were selected for inclusion based upon their quality, currency and level of supporting validation information. Vegetation units from all 11 datasets were translated to the Eastern NSW PCT Classification (Connolly et al., 2021) that is publicly available as of June 2022. The vegetation mosaic contains all original and legacy information from each of the 11 contributing datasets where that information existed. The vegetation mosaic also contains the original translations to the pre-June 2022 PCT's that was undertaken by Cockerill et al. (2013) Both classifications are now linked to DPE’s full floristic survey data (734 plots) that occur within the Cessnock LGA. These are referenced to ground truth data that also have associated Threatened Ecological Communities assigned.