1.0

The layer was created for the Municipal Biodiversity Summary Project which aims to provide municipalities with biodiversity related information and spatial data. The data on vegetation types was taken from Mucina, L., Rutherford, M.C. & Powrie, L.W. (eds) 2005. Vegetation map of South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland which provide floristically based vegetation units of South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland. For the Municipal Biodiversity Summary Project this data was subset by municipality and used to provide a list of the vegetation types and their sizes (ha) per municipality. The percentage coverage of each vegetation type per

municipality is also provided.

SANBI

Methodology:

The original data was intersected with municipal borders and subset into separate files per municipality to be served on BGIS.

Available documentation:

Further documentation is available on the Municipal Biodiversity Summary Project on BGIS ( http://bgis.sanbi.org). This information includes summary statistics for specific biodiversity features per municipality, a terrestrial biodiversity summary map per municipality and documents explaining the background to the project with definitions of what the summaries include and fact sheets providing relevant information on biodiversity features and the implication of these biodiversity features for municipalities in terms of land-use planning and

decision-making.

The Municipal Biodiversity Summary Project uses data generated as of December 2009 and is based on the best available national spatial layers. Finer-scale biodiversity information is available for some municipalities and, if available, should be considered in land-use planning and decision-making in the municipality.

SANS 1878

FGDC-STD-001-1998