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Nominal Impervious Surface Map - Greater Sydney

Impervious surfaces were derived from two existing mapping products, producing six classes of impervious area: Buildings, Roads, Railways, Roads and Railways, Airports and Aerodromes, Stormwater Infrastructure.

Impervious Surfaces associated with buildings were derived from the Geoscape® Buildings Theme, which provides polygon representations of every building in Australia with a roof area equal to or greater than 9m2. Building polygons from the Greater Sydney Region were extracted and used to create the ‘Buildings’ feature.

Impervious Surfaces not associated with buildings were derived from the NSW Land Use Map 2017 (inclusive of the draft Land Use Mapping for the Sydney Metropolitan Region), which provides land use mapping for NSW at a 1:10,000 reliability scale, based on the Australian Land Use and Management Classification Code. This layer was used to generate the Roads, Railways, Roads and Railways (polygons reclassified during QC) Airports and Aerodromes, and Stormwater Infrastructure features.

Once both sets of features had been generated, they were intersected with LGA to aid in computation and provide additional map utility. Following this, any overlap between the Buildings features and the Land Use features was corrected using the Erase Function, before the layers were combined using the union function, and dissolved by LGA and feature class to provide LGA-level breakdowns of the prevalence and providence of impervious areas.

Data and Resources

Metadata Summary

Field Value
Language English
Edition v1
Purpose Mapping of Impervious Surfaces within the Greater Sydney Region
Frequency of change Not planned
Keywords LAND-Cover,HUMAN-ENVIRONMENT-Planning,HUMAN-ENVIRONMENT-Urban-Design,WATER-Hydrology
Metadata Date 2020-01-04
Date of Asset Creation 2020-03-18
License OEH licence
Equivalent Scale 10000
Vector representation
Record 1
Object type
Surface
Object count
Geospatial Topic Environment
NSW Place Name Greater Sydney
Extent

Dataset extent

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
Temporal Coverage From 2017-01-01 - 2017-01-31
Datum GDA94 / MGAZone 56
Legal Disclaimer Read
Attribution NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water asserts the right to be attributed as author of the original material in the following manner: "© State Government of NSW and NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water 2025"
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