Continental Stress Class
Continental Stress Class is a method of describing the landscape health of biogeographic regions in Australia. There are six Continental Stress Classes with Class 1 containing the most stressed regions and Class 6 the least stressed and therefore most healthy. The classification takes into account indicators of landscape health such as the extent, condition, connectivity, and rate of clearing of native vegetation; changes to soil and hydrological conditions; the presence of feral plants and animals; the presence of threatened species and ecological communities; and threats such as dryland salinity; and fire regime. Continental Stress Classes were first  introduced by Gethin Morgan in 2001, in the report "Landscape Health In Australia: A rapid assessment of the relative condition of Australia's bioregions and subregions". Morgan gave a class to each of the Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia (IBRA) subregions, as follows: The classification is now used by a range of federal and state government agencies in Australia.