Land Use - Land Use in Western Australia
Land Use in Western Australia
Land Use patterns
Western Australia is the largest Australian State occupying a third of the continent. From its tropical north, to temperate areas in its south-west corner, Western Australia experiences a variety of climatic conditions. With distance from the coast, rainfall decreases and temperature variations are more pronounced.
Agriculture covers an area of 117.1 million hectares, with grazing of native pastures representing 89 percent of the agricultural area. The State's vast area provides soils and climates suited to a variety of agricultural production from open range grazing and broadacre cereal cropping to irrigated pastures and horticulture, orchards and vineyards. Wheat, wool, beef and lamb are its main products. Tropical and temperate horticultural products and stockfeed are also important. In 1996/97 agricultural products had a gross value of $4.3 billion. Cropping contributed $2.5 billion, livestock industries $1.4 billion and horticulture $0.3 billion.
Areas of minimal use represent nearly 92 million hectares (or 36 percent) of Western Australia largely as vacant crown land. This is concentrated in the arid interior of the State. Likewise, traditional indigenous uses cover 9 percent (or 23 million hectares) of the State.
The nearly 17 million hectares of nature conservation is scattered throughout Western Australia covering a range of environments and falls mostly into strict nature reserve.
Forestry, on the other hand, is concentrated in the south-west and produces hardwood and softwood timbers and woodchips from natural forests and plantations.
Western Australia has a population of 1.9 million with the majority of people living in and around Perth, the capital city.
Processed mineral and agricultural products are the State's major manufacturing exports. Western Australia is a leading supplier of many mined commodities including gold, alumina, diamonds, iron ore and mineral sands.
Western Australia has been mapped at a finer resolution (scale 1:100 000). The distribution and proportions of land use may differ to that shown in the 1996/97 Land Use of Australia, Version 2. This is due to the finer resolution mapping being based on the value of production for agriculture rather than area.
View an A4 size map of WA land uses
Acknowledgments and Caveats
The 1996/97 Land Use of Australia, Version 2, is the source of the Australian land use information, maps agricultural and non-agricultural land uses for April 1996 to March 1997.
Non-agricultural land uses were derived from a number of available data sets:
- Protected areas are from the Collaborative Australian Protected Areas Database compiled and maintained by Environment Australia (CAPAD97 for Tasmania and CAPAD99 for mainland Australia).
- The topographic features of waterbodies, built-up areas and licensed airports are from TOPO-250K Version 1 (February 1999 update) released by Geoscience Australia.
- The 1997 Australian Land Tenure Data Set compiled by the National Forest Inventory (NFI) provided distribution of public, private and aboriginal land in Australia. Native and plantation forests are from the 1997 Australian Native and Plantation Forestry Data Set compiled by the NFI. The forestry data was improved by inclusion of Queensland plantation data from the 1995 Australian Land Cover Data Set prepared by the Bureau of Rural Sciences.
Agricultural land uses were determined through an automated process to spatially allocate the agricultural census data using satellite imagery using a method described as SPREAD (Walker & Mallawaarachchi 1998). Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) data captured by the Australian Centre for Remote Sensing was processed by CSIRO Division of Marine Research. Further processing was undertaken by Environment Australia to provide maximum NDVI (Normalised Difference Vegetation Index) composite images with the majority of cloud contamination removed.
Control sites were provided by various state and territory agencies largely through field visits and farmer interviews. The participating agencies were: NSW Agriculture, Victorian Department of Natural Resources and Environment, QLD Department of Natural Resources, Primary Industries and Resources SA, Agriculture WA, Tasmanian Department of Primary Industries, Water and Environment and NT Department of Lands Planning and Environment.
The maps of land use across Australia use a simplified 5km grid cell, whilst the State and territory maps utilise the 1km grid cell size of the 1996/97 Land Use of Australia, Version 2. All tabular data was determined from the 1km grided product.
The data presented (unless indicated) reflects 1996/97 statistics from a range of sources with particular use of the 1996/97 Land Use of Australia, Version 2 and the Australian Bureau of Statistics' agricultural census data, AgStats.
Those establishments with only a small contribution to overall agricultural production are excluded from the agricultural census. Since 1993/94 all establishments with an estimated value of agricultural operations (EVAO) of $5000 or more are included. This EVAO was previously $22500 or more. The value of agricultural production is expressed in terms of gross value. Gross value is defines as the value placed on recorded production at wholesale prices realised in principal markets.
The reliability maps are relevant only to the agricultural land uses assigned to the 1996/97 Land Use of Australia, Version 2 data using the SPREAD method (Walker & Mallawaarachchi 1998) which provides two measures of reliability:
- Affinity - the difference between a cell's NDVI profile and the NDVI profile of the control site used to assign the land use. A value of 0 indicates a perfect match and 1 indicates maximum dissimilarity.
- Pass number - the number of iterations required to allocate the agricultural land use to a cell. The smaller the value, the more reliable the land use allocation.
For simplicity, the affinities and pass numbers have been categorised into 3 classes.
| Reliability | affinities |
|---|---|
| Most reliable : | affinity values of 0.000 to 0.030 and those areas manually allocated |
| Medium reliability : | affinity values of 0.030 to 0.047 |
| Least reliable : | affinity values of 0.047 to 0.483 |
| Reliability | pass number |
|---|---|
| Most reliable : | 1 pass and those areas manually allocated |
| Medium reliability : | 2 or 3 passes |
| Least reliable : | 4 to 19 passes |
Factors such as the representativeness of the control site used (affected by distance, geographical region, homogeneity etc) and the number of different agricultural land uses within a region to be solved affect the affinity value and pass number obtained for an individual pixel.
What is the area of different land uses in WA?
| Land Use Description | Total Extent ('000 ha) | Total Extent (%) |
|---|---|---|
| No Data | 33.6 | 0 |
| Nature conservation | 16602.2 | 6.6 |
| Other protected areas including indigenous uses | 23349.5 | 9.2 |
| Minimal use | 91952.6 | 36.4 |
| Livestock grazing | 104589.2 | 41.4 |
| Forestry | 1964.9 | .8 |
| Dryland agriculture | 12519.4 | 5 |
| Irrigated agriculture | 29.1 | 0 |
| Built environment | 216 | .1 |
| Waterbodies not elsewhere classified | 1194 | .5 |
Where are the agricultural lands in Australia?
Link to a description or map of agricultural lands in Australia.
What sources of information were used?
Australian Bureau of Statistics (1999) AgStats: Small Area of Agricultural Commodity Data 1996-97
Australian Bureau of Statistics (1999b) Australian Demographic Statistics. (3101.0 June 1999)
Australian Land Use Management Classification
Bureau of Rural Sciences (1997) National Forest Inventory, Australian Tenure 1:250 000
Bureau of Rural Sciences (1999) 1995 Land Cover 1:25 000
Bureau of Rural Sciences (1999) National Forest Inventory, Native Forest and Plantations of Australia 1:250 000
Division of National Mapping (1980) Atlas of Australian Resources, Third Series, Volume 1 Soils and Land Use. Canberra
Environment Australia (1998) Collaborative Australian Protected Areas Database - CAPAD97
Environment Australia (2000) Collaborative Australian Protected Areas Database - CAPAD99
National Land and Water Resources Audit (2001) 1996/97 Land Use of Australia, Version 2
Randall, L (2001). Coordination of land use mapping of key implementation areas. Final Report BRR6. National Land and Water Resources Audit, Canberra.
Stewart, J.B., Smart, R.V., Barry, S.C. and Veitch, S.M. (2001)1996/97 Land Use of Australia - Final Report for Project BRR5 , National Land and Water Resources Audit, Canberra.
Tasmanian Department of Primary Industries, Water and Environment (1999) Tasmanian Rural and Fishing Industry Profiles
Walcott, J.J., Zuo, H. and Rath, H. (2001) Recent changes in agricultural land use in Australia. Proceedings of the 10th Australian Agronomy Conference, Hobart, 2001
Walker, P.A. and Mallawaarachchi, T. (1998) Disaggregating agricultural statistics using NOAA-AVHRR NDVI. Remote Sensing and the Environment 63, 112-125
Further information
- Link to the map maker to view national land use information
- Link to the Australian Natural Resources Data Library to download national and regional scale land use data
- Agriculture WA
- Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry
- Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts
- Australian Bureau of Statistics
- Geoscience Australia
- Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics
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