The Sydney Harbour Foreshore and Estuarine Vegetation dataset was generated by Botanic Gardens Trust, Sydney (BGT) for the data owners, NSW Maritime, and is subject to NSW Maritime data license agreement.
Sydney Harbour and its tributaries form an important and dynamic ecosystem with substantial natural values while continuing to provide a focus for extensive urban development, valued open space and recreational opportunities as well as being maintained as a ‘working harbour’.
The estuarine components of this project cover all estuarine areas of Sydney
Harbour, Parramatta River and tributaries. This includes the area from North Head to South Head, including upstream to the natural tidal limits of Middle Harbour (St. Ives and Davidson) to the weir on Lane Cove River; the eastern-most weir at Parramatta; and to Granville at Duck River and Duck Creek.
The foreshore components of this project include, as a minimum, the foreshore land from Mean High Water Mark (MHWM) to 40m landward. In some instances the mapping was extended upslope beyond 40m to a maximum of 200m, where
contiguous vegetation was present. The shoreline of the study area is a little over
360km in length.
Although the estuary and its immediate foreshore are the focus of this study it is not possible to protect the significant natural values without consideration of the broader catchment and its contribution to the functioning of this ecosystem. The catchment has an approximate surface area of 217 km2.
API (aerial photographic interpretation) and ground truthed vegetation mapping of the Sydney Harbour foreshore at a presentation scale of 1:2000 was necessary to prioritise property-scale management objectives of NSW Maritime and to place these objectives in a catchment perspective. Native terrestrial vegetation communities were categorised to match the categories of the Cumberland Plains 1:16,000 vegetation map, but were further divided on structural characteristics. API was performed using the 2003 15cm pixel ortho-rectified colour ECW format aerial photo mosaics of Sydney Harbour.
The non veg areas of the foreshore were removed from the dataset - see lineage for more detail.
VIS_ID 4030
