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Client:  NSW Department of Environment & Conservation

The Cumberland Plain is the area of the Hawkesbury-Nepean river plain separating Sydney metro area from the Blue Mountains.  This area has experienced significant clearing of native vegetation and is under severe development pressure as Sydney expands.

The NSW Department of Environment & Conservation (formally NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service) has developed a draft Recovery Plan for the Cumberland Plain. It focused on assessing the impacts of a range of conservation targets, two of which were a short term target of “net gain” through to a long term target of 30%. The Department wished to assess the socio-economic impacts of the Draft Plan in order to provide context to the targets proposed and a comparison to the scenario of not implementing the plan.  The assessment outputs have been used to inform Government decision making on the implementation of the Recovery Plan.

Spatial Vision was commissioned, as part of the consortium team, to undertake the assessment. The assessment methodology was based on the optimisation of a set of scenarios developed to explore options for meeting the Plan’s key remnant vegetation retention targets achieved through the selection of combinations of vegetated and potential revegetation landscape units. These units or “clumps” were derived from the current extent of the endangered ecological communities of Cumberland Plain.

“…halt the loss and achieve a net gain in the extent and condition of bush on the Cumberland Plain”

A critical input to the assessment process was a comprehensive database of environmental, planning and economic attributes that were derived from spatial information sourced from NSW government agencies. Spatial Vision’s role was to provide design input to the project’s scope and also provide spatial recommendations to develop the procedures that created the required spatial attributes. In-turn, Spatial Vision developed the optimisation database and to created the visualisations of the results from the various optimisation scenarios.

The resultant database maintained a link to the base landscape units (clumps) thus enabling an efficient and user-friendly visualisation database with all input variables, weightings and scenario outputs.

Demonstrated Capabilities

Resources

 Milos Pelikan developed the spatial analysis and data development methodologies employed in this project and managed the project interaction between Spatial Vision the consortium partners and the Client.

Technologies Applied

• ArcGIS 8.3
• Spatial Analyst (ArcInfo GRID)
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A key feature of the approach developed by the consortium was the maintenance of the spatial link to individual landscape clumps throughout the selection process.  This linkage enabled each scenario to be visualised and thus assist in both understand and communicating the impacts of the Recovery Plan scenario.  This study is a landmark in the coupling of GIS and optimisation methodologies to assess the impacts of strategic planning options.  The concepts and general approach developed by the consortium have relevance to a wide variety of strategic planning disciplines.

The key success factors of this project were a combination of:

• the efficient data collation, development and management procedures implemented by Spatial Vision.
• the collaboration and input from economic and planning specialists from Marsden Jacobs and SGS with GIS analysis specialists from Spatial Vision
• the modular database development procedures implemented by Spatial Vision that allowed for incremental review and quick integration of the data variables requested by the client and the rapid exploration of alternative options.