Biodiversity
Biodiversity is defined by the National Strategy for the Conservation of Australia's Biological Diversity as "the variety of all life forms - the different plants, animals and microorganisms, the genes they contain, and the ecosystems of which they form a part.
It is not static, but constantly changing; it is increased by genetic change and evolutionary processes and reduced by processes such as habitat degradation, population decline, and extinction".
Biodiversity Significance is the ranked significance of an area according to specified biodiversity values to account for ecological concepts such as rarity, diversity, fragmentation, habitat condition, resilience, threats, and ecosystem processes.
Biodiversity Planning Assessment (BPA) is the implementation of the Biodiversity Assessment and Mapping Methodology that results in a map and database information product maintained by the EPA. The digital coverage results from a process of information collation, integration, analysis, interpretation, spatial data development and mapping.
Biodiversity Planning Assessments identify three levels of Biodiversity Significance - State, Regional and Local - based on a number of data queries that simultaneously integrate an array of information for a bioregion. They may also indicate areas that have not been assigned a Biodiversity Significance because they have not met the criteria for State, Regional or Local Significance based on current information.
The Queensland Herbarium is the state’s storehouse of information about plants and plant communities. This state government research institution studies, describes and names plants and records the floristics, structure, distribution and conservation status of Queensland’s plant communities.Regional ecosystems are defined as vegetation communities in a bioregion that are consistently associated with a particular combination of geology, landform and soil. Remnant vegetation is administered under the Vegetation Management Act 1999, however, it is recognised that the condition of remnant vegetation varies and that non-remnant vegetation can have significant biodiversity values. The BioCondition manual provides a set of site-based attributes by which a patch of vegetation can be assessed for condition against a benchmark. The reference site manual describes the methodology to obtain the benchmark values. Condition of vegetation is often used as a surrogate for the total biodiversity present at a site.
The regional ecosystems classification scheme and the associated Biodiversity Planning Assessments are part of the biodiversity planning framework has been developed to assist the EPA to plan for biodiversity both on and off reserve.
Last updated: 05 June 2007
