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The 2016 Western Cape Ecosystem Threat Status should be considered as best available science in all land-use planning and decision-making. It should be considered as one of the lead informants when assessing significance ratings of development applications or in calculating biodiversity offsets. Threatened ecosystems identified according to CapeNature’s 2014 or 2016 assessments will not, however, trigger a basic assessment in terms of listing notice 3 of the NEMA EIA regulations as they have not yet been gazetted.

Until such time, ‘Listed threatened ecosystems’ will continue to refer to those NBA 2011 threatened ecosystems which were published in terms of NEMBA, and are noted in the attribute table accompanying this product (see field "NBA_ETS11"). It is also important to note that while the original extent of each ecosystem has been mapped, a basic assessment report in terms of the EIA regulations is only triggered in remaining natural habitat within each ecosystem and not in portions of the ecosystem where natural habitat has already been irreversibly lost.

All data are supplied with no expressed or implied warranty as to their suitability for purpose, planimetric accuracy or completeness. The WCNCB cannot be held responsible for any errors, which may occur in provided data sets. DEADP will not incur any legal liability pertaining to this data or use thereof.

The original extent of ecosystems falling within the Western Cape Province and the current remaining extent of those ecosystems were both assessed in a Geographic Information System (GIS), using a UTM34 South projection. Ecosystem boundaries are based on the most recent version of the Vegetation Map of South Africa (SANBI, 2016; nvm2012beta2_wgs84_Geo.shp), as well as national indigenous forest types (DAFF, 2010), as per the national approach to ecosystem threat assessment.

Results from three threat assessments were joined to this ecosystem map: (1) the national assessment in 2011 (note: threatened ecosystems identified in the NBA 2011 are the same as those listed in the gazette in December 2011); (2) CapeNature’s 2014 assessment of criterion A1 (habitat loss); and (3) the highest status achieved in either the national assessment or CapeNature’s 2016 assessment of criterion A1 (habitat loss). The 2016 assessment of habitat loss primarily utilized CapeNature’s revised 2013/14 land cover product, as well as the 2010 Western Cape Biodiversity Framework land cover data. All land cover classes representing the outright loss of natural habitat (e.g. cultivated areas, forestry plantations, mines, dams, urban or built-up areas) or areas of severe degradation (e.g. pure invasive alien plant stands, significantly over-grazed or heavily eroded areas devoid of vegetative cover) were removed from the ecosystem map described above to create a remaining natural habitat layer.

In addition, all areas falling within DAFF’s 2007, 2013, or 2015 field crop boundary datasets were removed from the remnant layer described above. Additional on-screen digitizing of cultivated areas was also carried out where obvious habitat loss had occurred in the Sandveld region, according to SPOT5 2014 imagery and January 2016 Landsat8 imagery. The resulting remnants layer was used to calculate the amount (area) of each ecosystem remaining in good ecological condition. Compared to the original extent, the intact proportion of each ecosystem could be determined and used to categorize its threat status according to national thresholds.

SANS 1878

FGDC-STD-001-1998