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The National Vegetation Information System (NVIS) is a collaborative initiative between the Australian and state and territory governments to manage national vegetation data to help improve vegetation planning and management within Australia. The NVIS was developed to assist in managing a range of ecosystem services and practices such as biodiversity conservation, salinity control, improving water quality and fuel-load management.

The NVIS framework was developed to enable the compilation of a nationally consistent vegetation dataset from data collected by states and territories. It provides a comprehensive means of describing and representing the landscape vegetation information based on establishing relationships between structural and floristic data.

The Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Division within the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) engaged Spatial Vision to develop user requirements, specifications and a data model for the automation of Bioregional EVC benchmarks within Victoria to use as a basis for supplying native vegetation data at regular intervals to NVIS  Spatial Vision was subsequently engaged to develop the Victorian Vegetation Information System known as VicVIS.

The VicVIS application provides a range of functionality including the ability to maintain and update vegetation records; tools for discovery of information and benchmark reporting and the creation of digital files in .xml format that contain all attributes required for NVIS reporting.

The VicVIS application has been deployed to the Dept of Sustainability & Environment as an internal curatorial database and now represents the primary repository for Victorian Native Vegetation data. Already other systems including the Spatial Vision managed Field based Vegetation Assessment application & Spatial Vision developed Native Vegetation Tracking application access VicVIS for up-to-date Vegetation benchmark data.

Demonstrated Capabilities

The VicVIS is a Java J2EE web application using an Oracle RDBMS for data storage. VicVIS makes extensive use of modern web development techniques such as DHTML and Ajax (often referred to as Web 2.0) making it the first Spatial Vision developed Rich Internet Application (RIA). The rich interface offered by the application provides a series of dynamic screens for updating vegetation attributes. User changes affecting hierarchy or order are instantly reflected providing a greatly improved end-user experience.

A key aspect of the VicVIS project was the process of gathering User Requirements and translating these requirements into a set of specifications and a data model that could then be used as a basis to design, cost and deliver a functional system. Spatial Vision’s expertise in both vegetation and biodiversity data, together with our systems development capabilities ensured that we could engage with the client successfully at all stages of the project.