National Forest and Sparse Woody Vegetation Data (Version 3, 2018 Release)

Landsat satellite imagery is used to derive woody vegetation extent products that discriminate between forest, sparse woody and non-woody land cover across a time series from 1988 to 2018. A forest is defined as woody vegetation with a minimum 20 per cent canopy cover, potentially reaching 2 metres high and a minimum area of 0.2 hectares. Sparse woody is defined as woody vegetation with a canopy cover between 5-19 per cent.

The three-class classification (forest, sparse woody and non-woody) supersedes the two class classification (forest and non-forest) from 2016. The new classification is produced using the same approach in terms of time series processing (conditional probability networks) as the two-class method, to detect woody vegetation cover. The three-class algorithm better encompasses the different types of woody vegetation across the Australian landscape.