Trees

Disclaimer

Geoscape Australia believes this publication to be correct at the time of printing and does not accept responsibility for any consequences arising from the use of the information herein. Readers should rely on their own skill and judgement to apply information to particular issues.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission of Geoscape Australia.

Overview

Trees is a raster dataset representing tree coverage and heights, derived from remotely sensed imagery.

Geoscape Australia welcomes your feedback on the Trees Dataset. We also publish regular product development updates on our website (www.geoscape.com.au).

Release Summary

This product was released to customers on 20 December 2023 with data extracted on 6 December 2023.

• This release is a full national data population for Version 1.8 of the Trees product, described by the Trees Product Description v1.8.

Any issues that have been identified for this release are described in the Issues section.

This release includes updates for the areas listed in the table below.

Locations of updated areas by State

State	Location	Urban Area (km2)
NSW	Broken Hill City Council	50
NSW	Federation Council	20
NSW	Goulburn Mulwaree Council	59
NSW	Muswellbrook Shire Council	20
NSW	Singleton Council	48
NSW	Unincorporated - Far West Area	1
VIC	Indigo Shire	14
VIC	Latrobe City	27
VIC	Mornington Peninsula Shire	299
WA	City of Albany	111
WA	City of Kalgoorlie-Boulder	48
WA	Shire of Esperance	35
Total		732

^ Location names are derived from intersection with the most recent Local Government Area dataset.

Spatial files of the updated areas are available upon request via support@geoscape.com.au.

Change Notifications

Trees Metadata retirement

Trees Metadata layers have been retired from the product as of the December 2023 release. The layer was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain due to the transition from satellite to aerial capture and so has now been retired.

Removal of the ‘Documents’ folder from data packages

From November 2023, Geoscape will be progressively moving product descriptions, guides and reports online to https://docs.geoscape.com.au

Commencing with the May 2024 release, data packages will no longer include the Documents folder.

Issues

New Issues

No new issues to note.

Resolved Issues

No resolved issues to note.

Known Issues

The progress and status of known, ongoing issues are summarised below. For specific and further details on each issue, please refer to the Release Report identified in the ‘Release identified’ column.

Ongoing product issues

Release Identified	Theme - Issue Name	Issue Brief Description	Progress/Resolution	Status
Dec-16	Building - Tree heights near buildings and other trees	Terrain elevation values used in the calculation of tree heights have been found in some cases to be affected by the surrounding tall features such as buildings and other trees.	No update at this time.	Open
Mar-22	Trees over-capture	On Buildings, it has been observed that there are some situations where significant portions of some roofs have been captured as tree features. This is different from actual tree overhang and may be due some combination of building proximity to actual tree features, dark roof colour and/or shadow across roofs. In Dense, Shadowed and Water Areas, the spectral signature of these areas can incorrectly result in features being extracted as trees during remote sensing. Height calculation can help to exclude the majority of these during production, but where heights are determined to be greater than 2 metres they may persist.	We are working with our partner to limit these occurrences, as well as improving our processes to identify and correct the situations where they are present.	Open
Jun-22	Trees restricted to Surface Cover extents	Trees and Surface Cover have been designed to physically align the cells. Since the introduction of new capture methods new capture areas that extend past the raster index are clipped.	This will be investigated and resolved in a future release.	Open

Future Considerations

This section outlines enhancements or changes under consideration, but not planned into a specific release. For further details on future initiatives, please contact Geoscape Support.

Annex A – Release Counts

Trees Theme - Summary

Total coverage of Trees by state

State	Total Area (km2)
ACTNSW	3,258
NT	95
QLD	2,574
SA	333
TAS	288
VIC	1,441
WA	712
National	8,701