Dataset
Environment Protection Authority (EPA)
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Koala Habitat Suitability Model for North East NSW

A habitat suitability model at a 250 m resolution for the Koala Phascolarctos cinereus in north-eastern New South Wales using ‘presence only’ records and MaxEnt modelling. Model extent was based on the extent of Crafti vegetation mapping for north east NSW. Substantial spatial clustering of records in coastal urban areas was reduced using a 2 km spatial filter and by modelling separately two sub-regions divided by the 500 m elevation contour. An average of 1086 occurrence records was used to develop models. A bias file was prepared that accounted for variable survey effort, including the concentration of Koala records along sealed and unsealed roads. A reduced set of 14 variables was used in model building. The models were evaluated using a test set of 25 % of the records, with a resulting good fit for each model, as measured by AUC. Frequency of wildfire, Australian Soil Classification, floristic mapping and elevation had the highest relative contribution to the model, whilst a number of other variables made minor contributions. The model was field validated at 65 ground-truth sites.

Data and Resources

Metadata Summary What is metadata?

Field Value
Language English
Edition Version 1
Purpose To model variations in habitat suitability for Koalas in forests across tenure and at a fine resolution (250 m) using a range of environmental layers.
Frequency of change Irregular
Keywords Ecology - habitat,Native Fauna,VEGETATION,Natural Forests
Field of Research (optional) Ecology
Metadata Date 2017-06-02
Date of Asset Creation 2016-10-01
License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
Vector representation
Record 1
Object type
Curve
Object count
Geospatial Topic Biota
Extent

Dataset extent
Temporal Coverage From 1990-01-01
Datum GDA94 / MGAZone 56
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Attribution Environment Protection Authority (EPA) asserts the right to be attributed as author of the original material in the following manner: "© State Government of NSW and Environment Protection Authority (EPA) 2024"