ILLAWARRA BIODIVERSITY STRATEGY Vol. 2 - Wollongong City ...

Extantvegetationfiguresin Table15 are basedonmappingby Tozer et al. (2006)from aerial photostakenbetween1994 and2001. Therefore,these figures are likely toover represent current extantvegetation.As shownin Table15, mostofthe vegetationis distributed withinthe Wollongong LGA.Alargeportionof this is within thecontrolof theSydney Catchment Authority.Appendix 11 liststhe vegetationunitsasdefinedby Tozer et al. (2006) that occur in the Illawarra, alongside asummaryofthe key speciesandhabitat for eachcommunity.6.9 VEGETATION PRIORITIESThe SouthernRiversCMACatchment ActionPlan(CAP) (2006) broadly defines priority vegetationtypesas thosewith ‘30% of theiroriginal distributionbeingmanagedfor conservation’. The barriertodetermining this isthat there is no reliablemappingof the pre-Europeanextentof vegetationcommunities in the Illawarra. To define amore specificlistof vegetationprioritiesfor the IllawarrawedevisedaclassificationofvegetationprioritiesusingSCIVIvegetationmapping (Tozer et al. 2006).To do this,anassessmentwasmade ofthe endemism and reservationstatusof eachvegetationcommunity in the Illawarracomparedwiththe entireSCIVIstudy area. TheSCIVIstudy area extendsfromSydney in the north to the Victorianborder in the southand westtoGoulburn(Tozer et al. 2006).This enabledacomparisonto be made between the distributionsof plantcommunities within theIllawarraagainstthewholeSCIVIstudy area.Usingthis information, aranking ofthree priority classeshas beendeveloped(1 being highest). This isdesigned to helpinform themeeting of CAP targetsandpriority conservationareasacross the Illawarra.Table 16:Vegetationpriority classesPriorityEndemism%ofdistributionwithinthe Illawarra1 >60%