Australia's Indigenous forest estate (2020)

​​​​​Publication date: 03 December 2020

Australia’s Indigenous forest estate (2020) is a continental spatial dataset that identifies and reports separately the individual attributes of Australia’s Indigenous estate, namely the extent of land and forest over which Indigenous peoples and communities have ownership, management or co-management, or other special rights.

Australia’s National Forest Inventory has previously used the four derived category combinations of Dillon et al. (2015) for reporting the Indigenous estate in Australia’s State of the Forests Report 2013 and Australia’s State of the Forests Report 2018. These four categories combined in various ways the individual attributes of the Indigenous estate, with an area of land or forest being allocated to only one of the four categories. However, the categories did not allow separate reporting on Indigenous ownership, management or co-management, or other special rights.​

The methodology described in Australia’s Indigenous land and forest estate: separate reporting of Indigenous ownership, management and other special rights (Jacobsen et al. 2020) disentangles the four categories of Dillon et al. (2015), and allows separate reporting of each of Indigenous ownership of land or forest, Indigenous management or co‑management of land or forest, and land or forest over which Indigenous peoples and communities have other special rights. Separate spatial coverages were created for each of these attributes, and this new dataset can form the basis for subsequent reporting on the relationships between Indigenous peoples and land or forest.

The methods and data in this data package use the same sources of data used for assembling the Australia’s Indigenous forest estate (2018) spatial dataset, but presents the information on the Indigenous land estate by the separate attributes ownership, management of co-management, and other special rights, according to the new methodology of Jacobsen et al. (2020). The Indigenous land dataset is also combined (intersected) with forest cover information from the Forests of Australia (2018) dataset.​ The resulting output dataset provides information on the Indigenous estate for both land and forest.

The Indigenous estate land attributes are as follows (ABARES 2020; Jacobsen et al. 2020):

• ​Indigenous owned: freehold land or forest that is owned by Indigenous communities, or land or forest for which ownership is vested through other mechanisms
• Indigenous managed: land or forest that is managed by Indigenous communities
• Indigenous co-managed: land or forest that has formal, legally binding agreements in place to include input from Indigenous people in the process of developing and implementing a management plan
• Other special rights: land or forest subject to native title determinations, registered Indigenous Land Use Agreements, and legislated special cultural use provisions.​

Data

Australia's Indigenous forest estate (2020) ZIP [61 MB] – Esri grid (raster), layer file and metadata documents​​​​

Australia's Indigenous forest estate (2020) ZIP [74 MB] – GeoTIFF (raster), layer file and metadata documents

Lineage details PDF [0.3 MB]​

Attributes and lookup tables PDF [0.2 MB]

Metadata PDF [0.2 M​B​]​

​Graphic​s

Australia's Indigenous land estate (2020) – graphic only – PNG: [0.6 MB]

Australia's Indigenous forest estate (2020) – graphic only – PNG: [0.6 MB]

Further reading​​​​

Jacobsen R, Howell C, Read SM 2020, Australia's Indigenous land and forest estate: separate reporting of Indigenous ownership, management and other special rights. ABARES technical report, Canberra, December, DOI: doi.org/10.25814/bqr0-4m20. CC by 4.0

Superseded​ datasets