I'd like to incorporate it into the maps that I create for my own purposes - usually for bushwalking. Currently, I'm using a dataset from Geoscience Australia which I converted from Raster to Vector (and back to raster tiles again combined with other layers for a WMTS service!), but it's very low resolution, and not as specific as I'd like (but at least it shows scrub areas quite well).
Obviously there are way too many vegetation types in TASVEG 3.0 to symbolise them all meaningfully for such purposes (eg, for buttongrass alone, there are 6 different vegcodes). The vegetation group attribute should be more reasonable for such purposes (see the list of groups below).
However, the groups are not as useful for bushwalking purposes as I'd like. Some examples of issues with using it as-is include:
- No separate category for scrub (included in both rainforest and heathland, which can both be with or without scrub)
- Button grass would appear the same as any other grass, including marsupial lawn
I would like to develop a layer for TASVEG 3.0 that is specifically for bushwalking purposes, so it's symbology provides information about the type of vegetation (grass, rainforest, heath, eucalypt forest, native pine forest, etc) as well as information about whether it is difficult to walk through or not (eg, scrub vs open forest vs scrub within forest; button grass vs marsupial lawn).
I don't know if I'll ever find the time to do this, or if my knowledge of the various vegetation types is sufficient to get it right. I also suspect it may require two layers (from the same data source) with the 'walkability' layer displayed over the top of the existing veg group layer.
I know that there are a few other spatial data enthusiasts on this site. So has anybody else attempted to create such a layer? Or is there something like this that already exists?
I guess what I really need to figure out is:
- What 'walkability' categories do I want?
- Which vegcodes fit into those categories?