DPaW Imagery

The collection contains imagery; mostly satellite imagery from the Landsat series of satellites. This is multispectral imagery available every 16 days for the last 30 years providing a valuable archive to investigate historical trends and impacts on natural resources. Other imagery will include data from other satellites and airborne digital imagery. The data will enable time series research for a number of natural resource research questions across Western Australia. Two examples are rangelands monitoring and historical fire impacts. There are many interests and impacts on the rangelands areas of Western Australia including pastoral leases, conservation estate, mining and feral animals. Time series satellite imagery provides the data to understand the effect of different impacts and management strategies on this huge landscape of over 180 million hectares. Fire is a part of the Western Australian environment. Understanding changed fire regimes and altering these for improved community and biodiversity outcomes requires base information about the location, size and date of fire impacts. Landsat imagery has the required spectral information at a high resolution (25m pixel) and an extensive historical archive to find these fire impacts. Development of automated methods will enable population of the historical fire impacts across the state.