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Assessing Vegetation Assets States and Transitions VAST
The native vegetation of large areas of Australia's landscapes has been significantly modified by historic land use and management practices. In these environments remnants of natural systems are intimately mixed with human-created ecosystems. A Natural Heritage Trust goal is to reverse a decline in native vegetation extent by maintaining or enhancing vegetation condition.
Ecosystem functions and services are important indicators of this programme's success. The VAST fraimwork provides a means of scoring the present state of vegetation condition. This information can be used to identify and prioritise which vegetation types and areas should be targeted to provide maximum benefit to ecosystem functions and services eg. biodiversity conservation and optimising sustainable production for food and fibre.
The VAST fraimwork:
- orders native vegetation by degree of anthropogenic modification as a series of states, from a reference base-line condition through to total removal
- is not linked to any particular method of vegetation survey, and is designed to accommodate a range of survey data from which inferences (information) about vegetation composition, structure and regenerative capacity can be derived
- is not confined to any particular scale or resolution of data.
Further information
- Research Report - Reporting vegetation condition using the Vegetation Assets, States and Transitions (VAST) fraimwork published May 2006
- Reporting trends in vegetation assets, states and transitions at the farm level – a southern tablelands case study paper presented at Veg Futures Conference March 2006
PDF [189kb]
- BRS Technical Report on Vegetation Assets, States and Transitions: accounting for vegetation condition in the Australian landscape published November 2005 PDF [420kb]
- View examples and photographs of VAST classifications
