AusSeabed: Australian National Seabed Mapping Coordination Program

Australia's marine jurisdiction covers over 10 million square kilometres, with less than 25% of its seafloor mapped at high-resolution. The AusSeabed program, facilitated by Geoscience Australia, coordinates national seabed mapping efforts to reduce duplication and improve data consistency. It includes a government priority plan, survey register, and is developing cloud-based data sharing infrastructure and common mapping tools.

Use Cases

• Plan seabed survey acquisition based on the government priority plan mentioned in the description.
• Develop automated quality assurance workflows for bathymetric data using the tools mentioned.
• Apply a common geomorphic mapping approach for interpreting seabed data as described.
• Discover and access seabed mapping data through the cloud-based infrastructure being developed.

Strengths

• Covers a geographic area of over 10 million square kilometres.
• Includes published guidelines and a government priority plan for data acquisition.
• Program is a consortium of federal and state government, universities, and industry.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.

Provenance

Source

Geoscience Australia

Collection Method

Coordination program collecting data from government agencies, universities, and industry.

Time Range

Program status presented at the 2018 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-25 16:37:32.150431; freshness should be verified

Geography

Australia's marine jurisdiction, including the Antarctic Territory.