Waterbody artificiality

Find further information on the Conservation of Freshwater Ecosystem Values (CFEV) Program and its data at www.dpipwe.tas.gov.au/cfev.

Attribute data

TitleWaterbody artificiality

CustodianWater and Marine Resources Division, Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment

CreatorGIS Unit, Information and Land Services Division, Department of Primary Industries and Water

DescriptionThe extent to which a waterbody has been modified

Input data

  1. Hydro infrastructure and discharge data, Hydro Tasmania

Lineage

The artificiality and true artificiality score rates all waterbodies according to their ability to contain natural habitat features. Waterbodies were rated, using expert knowledge (Peter Davies, Freshwater Systems) in combination with Hydro data, according to the following categories:

0completely artificial waterbody (i.e. a river that has been dammed to make a waterbody (e.g. Lake Rowallan)

0.5partly artificial waterbody (i.e. lake that has been raised or modified by infrastructure (e.g. Lake Cumberland, Great Lake)

1natural waterbody (i.e. formed by natural processes and undammed)

One out of these three categories was assigned to waterbodies as the true artificiality score. The artificiality scores were determined by merging the 0.5 and 1 categories into a single category of 1, resulting in two categories (0 and 1). Appendix 13 of the CFEV Project Technical Report provides all the artificiality and true artificiality scores for all ‘valid’ named waterbodies. All unnamed ‘valid’ waterbodies received a score of 1 (natural waterbody). Specific rules are provided below.

Data limitations

The artificiality data inherits all the data limitations of the input data.

Date createdOctober 2004

Scale and coverage1:25 000; Statewide

Column headingWB_ARTIF, WB_TRARTI

Number of classesWB_ARTIF = 2, WB_TRARTI = 3

Type of dataCategorical

Assigning values to ecosystem spatial units

An artificiality score (0 or 1) and a true artificiality score (0, 0.5, 1) were assigned to the waterbodies as WB_ARTIF and WB_TRARTI, respectively, according to the following rules:

  1. Assign all named waterbody spatial units with an artificiality and true artificiality score as listed in Appendix 13.
  2. Assign remaining unnamed waterbody spatial units with an artificiality and true artificiality score of 1. This assumes they are natural.

CFEV assessment framework input

  1. Waterbodies>Condition assessment>Naturalness score (WB_NSCORE)