The Victorian Land Use Information System (VLUIS) dataset has been created by the Spatial Information Sciences Group of the Agriculture Research Division in the Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport, and Resources. The method used to create VLUIS is significantly different to traditional methods used to create land use information and has been designed to create regular and consistent data over time. It covers the entire landmass of Victoria and separately describes the land tenure, land use and land cover for each cadastral parcel across the state, biennially for land tenure and use and annually for land cover; for each year from 2006 to 2015. The data is in the form of a feature class.
To use the VLUIS data correctly it is important to understand the difference between the three components of VLUIS. The Guidelines for land use mapping in Australia: principles, procedures and definitions, Edition 3 published in 2006 by the Commonwealth of Australia, defines them as follows:
Land tenure is the ownership and leasehold interests in land (VLUIS only reports ownership). Land use means the purpose to which the land cover is committed or the property type. Land cover refers to the physical surface of the earth, including various combinations of vegetation types, soils, exposed rocks and water bodies as well as anthropogenic elements, such as agriculture and built environments.
The Victorian Land Use Information System (VLUIS) is an ongoing project designed to maintain and manage the Victorian land use mapping dataset.
The methodology is still being refined and as such the dataset is subject to improvements and the release of later versions. It is important you speak to the custodian to be advised of the technical details of the dataset and its utility for your desired use.
Land cover classification accuracy varies between classes and the overall classification accuracy may be misleading in terms of the accuracy of an individual class. Users are asked to contact the data custodians for detailed class accuracy information if required for their purposes.
Irrigation activity is included when available. The data was not available in 2006-07 and there was incomplete coverage in 2012-13 and therefore the irrigation activity was not included in either of those datasets.
The dataset does not replace LandUse100 which is still valid for the time in which it was created (1996 - 2005).
A metadata statement, for the VLUIS 2006/07 product, and ESRI symbology files for the data can be freely downloaded from the VLUIS project page:
http://vro.depi.vic.gov.au/dpi/vro/vrosite.nsf/pages/vluis
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.n08t0
