When you are working in the BAP Priority Habitats stream, having selected your Primary Information layer you can then create a Thematic Map layer. This allows you to show features from your chosen Primary Information layer (for example, Government Regions) shaded according to their importance for a BAP priority habitat. The percentage of the national resource present in each feature is used as the basis for classification.

Having chosen a habitat to thematically map, you then need to select a classification method. There are two choices - Equal Interval (5 bands) or Quintiles.

The Equal Interval (5 bands) classification ensures that the range of possible values (excluding zeros), is divided into equal-sized intervals, although the number of features in each class will vary and the setting of class limits is done automatically from the range available. Features containing none of the chosen habitat are treated as a special case exempted from the classification, and displayed as transparent polygons (no fill) - they are listed "0" in the Legend. So for example if the range of percentage values for your chosen Primary Information layer is 0 to 50.00, the symbolised classes will be "0" (transparent fill), with five Equal Interval classes set at approximately 0.01 - 10.00, 10.01 - 20.00, 20.01 - 30.00, 30.01 - 40.00 and 40.01 - 50.00. You can choose to display the 5 classes or bands in a series of reds, greens, blues or greys.

The Quintiles classification ensures that each class has the same number of values (one fifth of the total number, excluding zeros again) from the Primary Information layer dataset. This will produce unequal class ranges but classes at the extremes and middle will have the same number of values. Information layer features with none of the chosen habitat are again exempted from the classification, and symbolised as transparent (no fill) - and again they are listed "0" in the Legend. You can choose to display the 5 classes or bands in a series of reds, greens, blues or greys.

In the BAP Priority Habitats stream, the classified features will also be labelled when you are zoomed in enough, to indicate their ranking. For example, the label "Rank: 23 of 330" for a feature indicates that it ranks 23rd in terms of the percentage of the national resource for that habitat it contains, out of a total of 330 Information layer features which contain at least some of that habitat.

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