Recent datasets

This dataset contains the major roads for Australia, extracted from the OpenStreetMap project on December 2011 by CloudMade.

From the complete set of roads in the OpenStreetMap shapefile only major roads were extracted. This created a smaller high performance shapefile.

In ArcMap loaded the AU_CloudMade_OpenStreetMap-Dec-2011 shapefile then used the Analysis Tools/Extract/Select tool to extract the major roads.

Input Feature Class: australia_highway.shp
Output Feature Class: AU_OSM_MajorRoads.shp

This dataset corresponds to the polygon digitisation of tourism sites and sugar mills. The locations of the tourism sites were obtained from a commercial database of tourism operators (Australian Tourism Warehouse). The location of sugar mills was obtained from information gathered on the internet and point locations were created for each mill. These datasets were developed to fill in missing source datasets for the scenario modelling used for the coastal development modelling.

This dataset contains the estimated distribution and abundance of cassowaries across the Wet Tropics Region and the sub-regions used in these estimates. The key areas for cassowary conservation are those with the highest densities and abundance.

This data is based on field surveys and data on cassowary density derived from faecal-DNA analysis of dung samples collected during those surveys.

Methods:

The Wet Tropics World Heritage Area (WTWHA) is famous for its wildlife, biodiversity and natural beauty, but none of these important assets are bought or sold in the market place, so none are explicitly ‘valued’ with a price. Recognising that absence of price does not mean absence of value, this project seeks to improve our understanding of the importance of these non-market ‘values’ to a variety of different stakeholders. How important is a beautiful view or a cassowary to the community, to tourists and to the tourism industry?

Long-term social and economic monitoring helps reef managers understand the current status of marine park users, industries and communities. It also helps build a picture of how industries and communities are likely to respond and cope with changes associated with environmental degradation, climate change, regulatory frameworks, and changes in culture.

Little is known about the impacts of fire on rainforest vegetation or the animals which depend on it. This project will investigate the positive and negative impacts of fire on rainforest vegetation and wildlife. In collaboration with NPRSR rangers, and where possible with local NGOs and Indigenous Rangers, we propose to establish vegetation and faunal monitoring sites across the rainforest/woodland boundaries and associated vegetation types in key areas of the Mission Beach, Tully lowlands and Hinchinbrook Channel areas to assess faunal and floral status and trends.

This project undertook a scoping study to develop a robust approach that will allow us in Phase 2 to carry out an ecological risk assessment (ERA) of nutrients, fine suspended sediments, and pesticides used in agriculture in the GBR region including ranking the relative risk of individual contaminants originating from priority catchments to the GBR ecosystems using a systematic, objective and transparent approach.

This project is conducting surveys of frogs and other vertebrates in ecotonal areas of the Wet Tropics and Eungella.

This project will act as an integrating focus within the rainforest theme to strategically target research gaps and thereby increase our understanding of the drivers of rainforest biodiversity. We will generate high resolution maps and landscape scale estimates of temporal trends in the condition of biodiversity and environmental changes.

The project consists of four subprojects:

A. Monitoring: Tasks include a microsensor network, standardised vertebrate surveys, habitat structure monitoring and data harvesting from other projects.