Updated Wilderness Inventory
The Wilderness Inventory was first prepared in the early 1990s as a series of maps identifying wilderness quality through two key attributes: remoteness and naturalness.
While the dataset had not been updated for many years, it remained a valuable baseline tool in South Australia for implementing the Wilderness Protection Act 1992 (WP Act), which requires that all land in the state is assessed for its wilderness quality.
In late 2022, the Department for Environment and Water (DEW), in partnership with the Parks and Wilderness Council and The Wilderness Society, commissioned the University of Queensland to develop an updated Wilderness Inventory. This study used two refined attributes for identifying wilderness quality: modern industrial levels and habitat area, quality and fragmentation.
The outputs of this study include a technical report, spatial datasets (including a MetaData file), and a map of the state. Later this year we will add a Wilderness Inventory layer to South Australia’s NatureMaps.
By updating the Wilderness Inventory, accurate and modern information will be available to assess wilderness quality and inform conservation efforts. It also provides DEW and the general public with a dataset and analysis method that can be consistently and repeatedly used to apply wilderness quality assessment over any terrestrial area of the state.
