Aggregate Ecosystem Groups for the National Climate Risk Assessment

For the National Climate Risk Assessment (NCRA), Australia’s ecosystems were divided into groups defined by their broad vegetation types. Referred to as “Aggregate Ecosystem Groups” or AEGs. These AEGs were determined by aggregating the National Vegetation Information System (NVIS) version 6.0 Major Vegetation Groups (Australian Government, Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEW)) into 18 groupings considered to have similar vegetation structure and compositional dominants, These 18 Groups are:

AEG_ID DESCRIPTION
1 Acacia forests, woodlands and shrublands
2 Callitris and other forests and woodlands
3 Casuarina forests, woodlands and shrublands
4 Chenopod shrublands
5 Eucalypt forests
6 Eucalypt woodlands
7 Hummock grasslands
8 Mallee woodlands and shrublands
9 Mangroves and saltmarshes
10 Melaleuca forests, woodlands and shrublands
11 Other
12 Rainforests and vine thickets
13 Sedgelands and rushlands
14 Shrublands
15 Tussock grasslands
16 Other terrestrial (forests, woodlands, shrublands, bare)
17 Inland Aquatic (freshwater, salt lakes, lagoons)
18 Seas and estuaries
99 unknown

These aggregations were applied to both the Pre-1750 and Existing input Major Vegetation Group data and are provided as GeoTIFFs in the same co-ordinate reference system and cell resolution as the source Major Vegetation Group input data, ie 100m GDA 1994 Australia Albers (EPSG 3577)

A vectorised version of the Existing (Present) AEGs is also provided as a shapefile in GCS WGS 1984 (EPSG 4326), used for regional spatial summarisation of raster data. Note the shapefile version does not differentiate AEGs 16, 17 and 18. These are included in the AEG 11 Other