Streambanks 3rd Order Strahler and Above - Cessnock LGA

The Department of Planning provides support to Local Government to enable evidence-based planning decisions. Biodiversity and Conservation Division collaborated with Cessnock City Council in 2021-2022 to deliver environmental map layers (Environmental Lands Study) that facilitate council’s review of their Local Environment Plan. This dataset is one of those and maps all streambanks of larger streams in the 196,468-hectare Cessnock Local Government Area using the Strahler system to identify stream type. All tenures were mapped excluding National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) estate because they are formally reserved and protected under Local Environment Plans and were outside of the scope of the Environmental Lands Study. Data is in vector format and was produced to a scale range of 1:500 – 1:3000. The process for delineating streambanks for the Cessnock LGA began by mapping stream order, then adding LiDAR and NearMap imagery as a basemap. The technique of hillshading was then used to show the streambank top edge and topographic features of streambanks. All streams higher than 2nd order were buffered by 100m to create the area of interest (AoI) for mapping streambanks. High resolution Light (or Laser) Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) was converted to a hillshade to facilitate the delineation of 3rd order and above streambanks. Streambanks were mapped at a scale of 1:3,000 as lines using a pen graphic tablet and the dataset saved to a file geodatabase.