This digital soil landscape product contains natural resource mapping for the Merriwa. The Merriwa Plateau is located in the upper Hunter catchment including hills of the Southern Liverpool Ranges; grading to gently sloped plateau around Merriwa. The project was funded by the National Partnership Agreement to provide improved soil and landscape information for this highly productive agricultural area. It has enabled more accurate and better quality Land and Soil Capability and Soil Fertility information to be available for future updates of Biophysical Strategic Agricultural Land (BSAL) mapping under the NSW Strategic Regional Land Use Policy (SRLUP). This resource information will also assist other decision making, planning and environmental modelling throughout the catchment.

Forty soil landscape map units have been described for the Merriwa Plateau. Each unit is an inventory of soil and landscape information with relatively uniform land management requirements, allowing major soil and landscape qualities and constraints to be identified. Soils are described using the Australian Soil Classification and the Great Soil Groups systems.

Related Datasets: The dataset area is also covered by the mapping of the Soil landscape 1:100 000 and 1:250 000 mapping series for the mapsheets of Dubbo, Singleton, Murrurundi and Blackville. Part of this area is also covered by the mapping of Hydrogeological landscapes of NSW.

Online Maps: This and related datasets can be viewed using eSPADE (NSW’s soil spatial viewer), which contains a suite of soil and landscape information including soil profile data. Many of these datasets have hot-linked soil reports. An alternative viewer is the SEED Map; an ideal way to see what other natural resources datasets (e.g. vegetation) are available for this map area.

Reference: Office of Environment and Heritage, 2014, Soil and Land Resources of the Merriwa Plateau, NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, Sydney.