Assessment of Montane Peatlands and Swamps EEC on NSW Crown Forest Estate

The operational map for Montane Peatlands and Swamps was constructed to resolve long-standing issues surrounding its identification, location and extent within the NSW State Forest estate covered by the eastern Regional Forest Agreements. The project’s Threatened Ecological Community (TEC) Reference Panel (the Panel) reviewed the determination for Montane Peatlands and Swamps and agreed upon a set of diagnostic parameters for its identification through aerial photograph interpretation (API). These parameters included an elevation of greater than 400m and, broadly, the presence of treeless native vegetation on poorly drained soils. Using API, we then assessed whether Montane Peatlands and Swamps is present within more than 828,000 hectares of state forests within the coastal, tableland and montane regions of eastern NSW. A number of State Forests were excluded from the assessment because they fell below the elevation threshold or were underlain by Triassic sandstone sediments, which are explicitly excluded in the determination for Montane Peatlands and Swamps. In total we identified 1729.5 hectares of candidate Montane Peatlands and Swamps across State Forests in eastern NSW. From this we constructed several operational maps showing the extent of the Montane Peatlands and Swamps TEC within the relevant State Forests. More than 60% of the total mapped areas were located in the southern tablelands. The largest areas of the candidate TEC were mapped in Bago, Glenbog and Badja State Forests in the south, and in Boonoo and Girard State Forests in the north. Patch size varied, with more than 200 patches being smaller than 0.1 hectare and around 50 patches being larger than 30 hectares. It is noted that the broad mapping criteria will have captured a wide range of floristic assemblages including swamps, bogs, marshes, fens, meadows, grasslands and herb fields. Not all of these assemblage will be Montane Peatlands and Swamps, and it is highly likely that the mapping has captured two related TECs due to their overlapping environmental gradients and similar vegetation structure. These two TECs (Upland Wetlands of the Drainage Divide of the New England Bioregion and Carex Sedgeland of the New England Tableland, Nandewar, Brigalow Belt South and NSW North Coast Bioregions) are both candidate TECs within State Forests in their own right.

Operational TEC Mapping have been derived by API at a viewing scale between 1-4000 using ADS40 50 cm pixel imagery and 1 m derived LIDAR DEM grids for floodplain EECs.