National Wilderness Inventory
Australia: Our national stories
Australian Heritage Commission, 2003
ISBN 0 642 23561 9
4. Creating The Wilderness Database (continued)
4.5 Wilderness Database Structure
All wilderness analyses, and the resulting wilderness database lattices, are carried out and stored in the Universal Transverse Mercator projection.
This projection is used so that the results of analysis may be immediately related to standard Australian topographical maps sheets which are produced in the same projection. The disadvantage of maintaining the database in this projection is that it is not possible, without re-projection, to combine all survey units together to produce a single representation across Australia.
| Projection | Universal Transverse Mercator |
| Units | metres |
| Spheroid | Australian |
| UTM Zones | 49 through to 56 |
The standard wilderness database attributes are described in Table 4.9. These attributes are stored within the PAT INFO file associated with each lattice. The attributes that are specifically concerned with calculating 'arid' Biophysical Naturalness values are stored separately in a BIO INFO file associated with each lattice (equivalent in structure to the PAT INFO file).
The BIO INFO attributes are presented in Table 4.10. Each attribute in the wilderness database is associated with a particular stage in the analysis process (as shown in Figure 4.5). The first set of attributes relate to the first stage, the calculation of raw distances. The names of these attributes relate directly to each of the grouped feature coverages outlined in Table 4.1.
The second set of attributes, relating to the second stage, contain distances to the minimum high grade equivalent (mHGE) features. The third set of attributes are the wilderness indicators, derived from the standardisation of the mHGE values. The Biophysical Naturalness attribute (biophysical), although a special case, is included here as a wilderness indicator. Wilderness, the wilderness quality attribute, is the final attribute of the wilderness database.
| Item name | Description |
Values |
|---|---|---|
| ACC1 ACC2 ACC3 ACC4 AES1LN AES2LN AES3LN SET1 SET2 SET3 SET4 AES1PT AES2PT AES3PT ACC2PT BUILTUP CULTURAL |
Distances Raw distances to the nearest feature in each grouped feature coverage. Assignment of each item to indicator grades is outlined in Table 4.1. |
Units: metres Range: 0 - 30000m Min Accuracy: 100m NB: Features not found within a radius of 30km are assigned a distance of 30km |
| ACCESS AESTHETIC SETTLEMENT |
Minimum Weighted Distance Distance to the nearest high grade equivalent feature for each of the distance-based indicators. |
Units: metres Range: 0 - 30000m Min Accuracy: 100m |
| ACCESS-CLS AESTHETIC-CLS SETTLEMENT-CLS BIOPHYSICAL* |
Indicators mHGE distances classified to standard class ranges. Note Biophysical is a special case. |
Units: class units Range: 0 - 5 (> 5 possible for distance-based ) |
| WILDERNESS | Wilderness Quality Summation of the four indicator values. |
Units: class units Range: 0 - 20 (> 20 possible although not used) |
| * The method of assignment for the Biophysical Naturalness value depends on whether the 'arid' or 'non-arid' Biophysical Naturalness assessment procedure is used. | ||
| Item name | Description | Values |
|---|---|---|
| PERM-PL PERM-LN PERM-PT |
Distances Raw distances to the nearest feature in each grouped feature coverage. Assignment to 'arid' Biophysical Naturalness is outlined in Section 4.3.1. |
Units: metres Range: 0 - 30000m Min Accuracy: 100m |
| RANGE STOCK |
Range type and tenure descriptors as outlined in Table 4.7. | Units: 3 descriptors |
| BIOPHYSICAL | Indicator Biophysical indicator value. |
Units: class units Range: 0 - 5 |