Landscape and Urban Planning 79 (2007) 127–136 Vegetation information for improved natural resource management in Australia Richard Thackway a,* , Alex Lee b , Randall Donohue c , Rodney J. Keenan a , Mellissa Wood a a Bureau of Rural Sciences, Edmund Barton Building, GPO Box 858 Canberra, ACT 2601 Australia b School of Resources, Environment and Society, Australian National University, ACT Australia c Ecosystem Dynamics Group, Research School of Biological Sciences, Institute of Advanced Studies, Australian National University, ACT Australia Available online 18 April 2006 Abstract Up-to-date, reliable information on the type, extent and condition of vegetation is increasingly required at a range of scales for a range of policy, regulation and management purposes. This paper describes the development of national level vegetation information frameworks for mapping vegetation across Australia. Vegetation mapping and monitoring in Australia have historically been the responsibility of state governments. In the late 1980s, the Australian and State and Territory governments developed the National Forest Inventory to facilitate the collection and availability of contemporary, valid and standardised forest data to assist in the planning and management for the conservation and use of Australia’s forests. The National Vegetation Information System framework (ESCAVI, 2003) expanded this concept for compiling vegetation structure and floristic information for entire landscapes. The National Vegetation Information System framework has recently been used to integrate data from a range of sources to provide a whole-of-landscape view of vegetation, including native, non-native and non-vegetation land covers. Map compilation approaches to vegetation assessment provide only one form of information required for policy, regulation or management decisions. Compiling and updating such snapshots of Australia’s vegetation cover provide little, if any, information on the condition of the vegetation. Differences between repeated snapshots through time using this approach are often the result of differences in classification approaches or mapping technologies rather than actual changes in the structure and/or floristics of the vegetation. It is argued that efficient assessment of change in vegetation condition requires repeated measurements of condition indicators at the same sites over time. We present a continental forest monitoring framework design concept to address this concern. Issues that need to be addressed relating to monitoring framework data and map-based information are also discussed in the context of adaptive management for improved natural resource management. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Vegetation; Forest; Mapping; Condition; Assessment; Monitoring 1. Introduction Maintaining the capacity of native and non-native vegetation to supply a wide range of commercial goods and environmental services is a high priority for all levels of government (NLWRA, 2001). In the past, vegetation information has largely been col- lected to meet the needs of particular sectoral interests, for example, the pastoral industry, irrigated agriculture, forest pro- duction, nature conservation or urban planning. A number of disparate and often unrelated vegetation data sets have been pro- duced for the same region or State. However, governments and * Corresponding author. Tel.: +61 262 72 48 56; fax: +61 262 72 38 82. E-mail address: richard.thackway@brs.gov.au (R. Thackway). the wider community increasingly require consistent, accurate and timely information on vegetation cover, use and condition to inform policy and management decisions (McIntyre et al., 2002). For example, natural resource management problems such as catchment management, salinity mitigation or biodiversity con- servation require a ‘whole-of-landscape’ view. Information on all vegetation across the landscape provides a baseline for assess- ing the multiplicity of issues impacting on vegetation retention, planting and management across tenures where there are trade- offs required between alternative uses. Hence, cross-sectoral approaches are required to achieve sustainable resource use and biodiversity conservation objectives (Bridgewater et al., 1996; Miller, 1996; Yaffee, 1999; Rumba et al., 2001). For these rea- sons, information needs to be integrated across public and private land tenures encompassing different land uses and forms of land 0169-2046/$ – see front matter © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2006.02.003