README FILE FOR AUSTRALIAN GROUND COVER REFERENCE SITES DATABASE 2014

CONTENTS
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1)  INTRODUCTION
2)  DATA CUSTODIAN
3)  ACCESS AND CONDITIONS OF USE
3)  CITATION
5)  DISCLAIMER, COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE
6)  DATA SOURCE
7)  DATA INFORMATION
8)  DIRECTORY, FILENAME AND DATA FORMATS 
9)  GEOGRAPHICAL COVERAGE
10) DATA QUALITY 
11) VERSION INFORMATION
12) PROCESSING UTILITIES
13) REFERENCES 
14) CONTACTS

1) INRODUCTION
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Fractional cover data derived from remote sensing can be used to monitor ground cover and to identify areas at risk of soil erosion. 

At a national workshop in November 2009 the MODIS-derived vegetation cover product of Guerschman et al (2009) was selected for monitoring ground cover for Australia (Stewart et al. 2011). The workshop also identified the need for a national network of ground cover reference sites to calibrate, validate and improve the accuracy of ground cover estimates derived from remote sensing, in particular the satellite sensors MODIS and Landsat. A database was required to store and retrieve field measurements of fractional cover, site descriptions, site images and other associated data. This database was created based on the recommendations of the 2009 workshop and modified through discussions with field data providers and as data was received. The database is an update of the 2013 version and now contains published field observations current as at August 2014. The database includes information from extra sites collected or made available and corrects identified errors. The database now contains 507 observations from 486 unique sites across Australia. The data are being used to improve the national MODIS-derived product of Guerschman et al. (2009, 2012, 2014). Refer to the Ground cover monitoring for Australia Final report (Stewart et. al. 2014) for information about other project outputs.  

The ground cover reference sites data have been collected by state and territory agencies as part of the Ground cover monitoring for Australia project, in order to calibrate, validate and improve the accuracy of ground cover estimates. This project was funded by the Department of Agriculture and coordinated by ABARES in partnership with the CSIRO and state agencies. These data have been collected by the: New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage, Department of Premier and Cabinet; Northern Territory Department of Land Resource Management; Queensland Department of Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts; South Australian Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources; Tasmanian Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment; Victorian Department of Environment and Primary Industries; and the Western Australian Department of Agriculture and Food. The database structure has been developed by ABARES with technical advice from the Queensland Department of Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts.
http://www.daff.gov.au/abares/aclump/pages/land-cover/ground-cover-monitoring-for-australia.aspx 

2) DATA CUSTODIAN
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The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) is the custodian of this dataset.

3) ACCESS AND CONDITIONS OF USE
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These data are available from: https://remote-sensing.nci.org.au/u39/public/html/modis/fractionalcover-sitedata-abares/index.shtml and http://www.aekos.org.au/home. 

Please note the citation and legal information in Sections 3 and 4 below.
To keep track of who is using the data, please do not pass the data on to a third party. Instead, refer them to the above websites.  

4) CITATION
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When referring to this dataset in publications: 

ABARES (2014) Australian ground cover reference sites database 2014. Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences, Canberra, Australia.
https://remote-sensing.nci.org.au/u39/public/html/modis/fractionalcover-sitedata-abares/index.shtml

We request that citations and copies of publications using these data be sent to: land_management@agriculture.gov.au.  

5) DISCLAIMER, COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE
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The Australian Government acting through the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) has exercised due care and skill in the preparation and compilation of the data outlined in this publication. Notwithstanding, ABARES, its employees and advisers disclaim all liability, including liability for negligence, for any loss, damage, injury, expense or cost incurred by any person as a result of accessing, using or relying upon any of the information or data set out in this publication to the maximum extent permitted by law.

The ground cover reference sites database is provided ‘as is’ without guarantee or warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including without limitation, any warranty of merchantability or fitness for a specific purpose. Commercial decisions should not be made without more detailed studies. 

ABARES may at any time, at its discretion, amend, vary or modify these terms and conditions. Modifications to these terms and conditions will be effective immediately and any subsequent use of the database will constitute acceptance of the modifications.

Postal address:
Department of Agriculture ABARES
GPO Box 858
Canberra ACT 2601
Phone: +61 2 6272 2010
Fax: +61 2 6272 2001
Email: land_management@agriculture.gov.au
Web: www.daff.gov.au/abares

© Commonwealth of Australia 2014

Creative Commons licence
All material in this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia Licence, save for content supplied by third parties, logos and the Commonwealth Coat of Arms.
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia Licence is a standard form licence agreement that allows users to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt this publication provided they attribute the work and distribute any resulting work under a licence similar to this one. A summary of the licence terms is available from https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/au/. The full licence terms are available from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/au/legalcode.
This publication (and any material sourced from it) should be attributed as ABARES 2014, Australian ground cover reference sites database 2014. CC BY-SA 3.0.

6) DATA SOURCE
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Data has been collected from the Australian national network of ground cover reference sites. Data collection by state and territory agencies was completed between July 2010 and June 2014. This README describes the published field site database as at 2014. The ground cover reference sites database conforms to the national standards for the field measurement of fractional ground cover and the description of sites (Muir et al. 2011). The data collected is entered into two electronic Microsoft Excel spreadsheets — the site description form and the transect form — and provided to ABARES for inclusion in the ground cover reference sites database with digital site photographs. The database has been created using open source software such that site data may be displayed within a geographical information system (GIS). PostGIS was chosen as it enables the object-relational database PostgreSQL to serve the site data spatially by site location, and to query the data using SQL functions.

7) DATA INFORMATION
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PostGIS is a free spatial database program that can be downloaded from http://postgis.refractions.net/. 

The ground cover reference sites database is available as a pg-dump SQL file. When executed the dump file creates and populates five data tables and three views. These tables contain: the location of the site; the transect measurements of non‑woody ground cover, woody vegetation <2m and woody vegetation >2m, at each intercept (generally 300 points); the summarised cover fractions; descriptions of vegetation, land surface, land use and management. 

Each site visit is assigned a unique_obs code. This individual text string of longitude_latitude_date is used to join or relate the tables.

Refer to the user guide (Rickards et al. 2014) for further information on the PostGIS database. 

8) DIRECTORY, FILENAME AND DATA FORMATS 
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The PostGIS database generated by running the SQL file contains five tables and three views. The tables contain static data imported from .csv files created from the Microsoft Excel files completed by the field data collectors. The views calculate fields using the data in the tables. The views are automatically updated as data is added or changed in the tables.  

Name	Content for each site	Type	
exposed	Exposed ground cover fractions of sites; bare soil (BS), non-green vegetation (NPV) and green vegetation(PV)	Data	
fc_raw	Raw data for each point along the transect layout (300 or 200 observations) 	Data	
photos	An index of 7 or 5 photographs taken along the transect layout	Data	
site_desc	Other information describing the site such as land use, vegetation species, soil surface condition, soil colour etc	Data	
sites_geom	Location in latitude and longitude 	Data(geom)	
fc3	Totals for the ground layer fractions; bare soil (BS), non-green vegetation (NPV), green vegetation (PV), and ground cover (PV + NPV) (%)	View	
fc_summary	Totals for each cover category (%)	View	
sum_check	Total cover to identify errors (%)	View	
PV = photosynthetic vegetation; NPV = non-photosynthetic vegetation; BS = bare soil

For further details refer to the user guide (Rickards et al. 2014).

9) GEOGRAPHICAL COVERAGE
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Data are provided as points with latitude and longitude unprojected, in geographic decimal degrees, referenced to the coordinate system WGS84.  

The data has the following spatial extent (coordinates of the cell outer edge):

      Lower left = 110.000000, -45.000512 
      Upper right = 155.001329, -10.000000 
	Number of columns = 9580
	Number of rows = 7451

10) DATA QUALITY 
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The quality of the database is dependent on the quality of field data collected as described in Muir et al. (2011). Training sites may be less reliable and incomplete compared to data collected once field operators are proficient in the site description and transect methods.

Each field site is 1 hectare (100 x 100 metres) in size. The sites are chosen to be representative of the surrounding area to a MODIS pixel size of 500 x 500 metres, and to have been visited as close as possible to Landsat imagery collection.  

11) VERSION INFORMATION
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This database replaces the 2013 version. 

The database contains field site observations from the Ground cover monitoring for Australia project that have permission to be published as at June 2014. The database contains 507 observations from 486 unique sites across Australia. This is a subset of the 596 unique sites (643 observations), mostly located in the rangelands, which were collected through the Ground cover monitoring for Australia project. An additional 43 observations and 26 new sites have been added to the database since the version published in 2013.

The database may be updated if more observations are submitted to ABARES for processing or errors are reported. 

12) PROCESSING UTILITIES 
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Soil colour recorded in the field using the Munsell Soil Color Charts has been classed into black, red, brown, yellow and grey using the colour class limits of the Australian Soil Classification: http://www.clw.csiro.au/aclep/asc_re_on_line/soilcocl.htm

If using SQL manager the DDL (Data Definition Language) tab displays the SQL statement which was used to create each table or view. Otherwise this statement can be seen by opening the SQL file in a text editor. 

13) REFERENCES 
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Rickards, JE, Stewart, JB, McPhee, RK, & Randall, LA 2014, Australian ground cover reference sites database 2014: User guide for PostGIS, Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences, Canberra. 

Guerschman, JP, Hill, MJ, Renzullo, LJ, Barrett, DJ, Marks, AS, & Botha, EJ 2009, ‘Estimating fractional cover of photosynthetic vegetation, non-photosynthetic vegetation and bare soil in the Australian tropical savanna region upscaling the EO-1Hyperion and MODIS sensors’, Remote Sensing of Environment, vol. 113 no.5 pp.928–945. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2009.01.006

Guerschman, JP, Oyarzabal, M, Malthus, TJ, McVicar, TM, Byrne, G, Randall, LA and Stewart, JB 2012, Validation of the MODIS-based vegetation fractional cover product, CSIRO Land and Water Science Report, Canberra.  http://www.clw.csiro.au/publications/science/2012/SAF-MODIS-fractional-cover.pdf 

Guerschman, JP, Scarth, P, McVicar, TR, Malthus, TJ, Stewart, JB, Rickards, JE, Trevithick, R and Renzullo, LJ in prep, ‘Assessing the effects of site heterogeneity and soil properties when unmixing photosynthetic vegetation, non-photosynthetic vegetation and bare soil fractions from Landsat and MODIS data’, submitted to Remote Sensing of Environment.

Muir, J, Schmidt, M, Tindall, D, Trevithick, R, Scarth, P & Stewart, JB 2011, Field measurement of fractional ground cover: a technical handbook supporting ground cover monitoring for Australia, prepared by the Queensland Department of Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts for the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences, Canberra. http://www.daff.gov.au/ABARES/pages/publications/display.aspx?url=http://143.188.17.20/anrdl/DAFFService/display.php?fid=pe_hbgcm9abll07701_13a.xml

PostGIS http://postgis.net/ 

Stewart, JB, Rickards, JE, Bordas, VM, Randall LA and Thackway, RM 2011, Ground cover monitoring for Australia–Establishing a coordinated approach to ground cover mapping: Workshop proceedings Canberra 23–24 November 2009, Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences, Canberra. http://www.daff.gov.au/ABARES/pages/publications/display.aspx?url=http://143.188.17.20/anrdl/DAFFService/display.php?fid=pe_abares99001799.xml

Stewart JB, Rickards JE, Randall LA, McPhee RK & Paplinska JZ 2014, Ground cover monitoring for Australia: Final report July 2012 to June 2013, ABARES Technical report 14.1, Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences, Canberra. http://data.daff.gov.au/anrdl/metadata_files/pb_gcmafrd9ablc20140515_11a.xml 

14) CONTACTS
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Department of Agriculture, Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences
land_management@agriculture.gov.au

Jasmine Rickards, DAFF ABARES, GPO Box 858,
CANBERRA ACT 2601, Australia, +61 2 6272 4808 Jasmine.Rickards@agriculture.gov.au

Jane Stewart, DAFF ABARES, GPO Box 858,
CANBERRA ACT 2601, Australia, +61 2 6272 3541 Jane.Stewart@agriculture.gov.au

August 2014