1. Australian Antarctic Data Centre
2. Discover and Manage Data
3. Records
4. HI_VEG_PHOTOS_VEGMAP

Description

These photos consist of 581 scanned 35mm colour slides (each approximately 2.2 MB) taken on Heard Island by Dr Jenny Scott (JJS) between December 1986 and February 2004. Areas covered are Gilchrist Beach in the northeast, to Spit Bay in the east, to Long Beach in the south, to Cape Gazert in the west, to Atlas Cove and Laurens Peninsula in the northwest. An equivalent set of 35mm photos for the remaining areas along the north coast is included in metadata record HI_VEG_NON_ORTHO_VEGMAP. Photos are either oblique aerial (taken from helicopter), terrestrial or ship-based. Although they were taken specifically to use for interpretation when finalising the vegetation mapping (HI_VEG_ORTHO_VEGMAP), they can also be useful for fieldwork planning of any sort, as they give an overview of terrain and topography covering most of the coastal and near-coastal areas of the island.

Shapefile - photo locations
One shapefile shows the approximate location and direction of the camera for each image. The location pointers were digitised as vectors with the start of the line being the approximate location of the camera and the end of the line providing the direction (hint: convert to arrows for ease of reference). Attributes include image name and file source, location, date of capture, where photo was taken from (aerial, ground, ship offshore), ID of original JJS slide, and comments (re quality of image, whether location approximate, etc).

Quality

Oblique aerial 35mm photos
These were taken in January 1987 when the Linhof aerial photography was flown (HI_VEG_ORTHOPHOTOS_VEGMAP). Wherever possible, a panoramic set of slides was taken of each ice-free coastal and near-coastal area from a helicopter. Slide quality is sometimes poor, as the slides were taken through a plexiglass helicopter window. Despite this, they are an extremely useful interpretive adjunct to the 1987 aerial photography and the digitised vegetation boundaries. Although they were taken specifically to use for interpretation when finalising the vegetation mapping (HI_VEG_ORTHO_VEGMAP), they can also be useful for fieldwork planning of any sort, as they give an overview of terrain and topography covering most of the coastal and near-coastal areas of the island.

Other 35mm photos - terrestrial and ship-based
Additional slides were taken at various viewpoints on the ground for each area during the 1986-87 and 1987-88 summers, and these are useful for checking vegetation detail at specific locations. Several series of slides taken in October 2000 and February 2004 are also included, as they show coastal areas poorly covered by aerial photography (e.g. NE coast of Laurens Peninsula). Note that vegetation detail, landslips etc on the 2004 slides of NE Laurens Peninsula may have changed in the 17 years between the date of these slides and the flying date of the airphotos on which the vegetation map is based.

Location of 35mm photos
The photo location shapefile shows the approximate location and direction of the camera for each image. None of the images are geo-referenced. Attribute data includes comments on individual image quality and whether location was 'approximate' or 'very approximate' (the latter applies especially to images taken from a helicopter offshore).

Access

A shapefile of the location of the photos is available for download at the provided URL.
The data are available via FTP.

Temporal Coverages

• Start date: 1986-01-01 - Stop date: 2004-02-01

Spatial Coverages

Science Keywords

• EARTH SCIENCE > BIOSPHERE > VEGETATION > VEGETATION COVER

Use Constraints

This data set conforms to the CCBY Attribution License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Please follow instructions listed in the citation reference provided at http://data.aad.gov.au/aadc/metadata/citation.cfm?entry_id=HI_VEG_PHOTOS_VEGMAP when using these data.