Australian Coastline Land Polygons from 2022-2024 Sentinel 2 Imagery

Land area polygons of the Australian coastline and surrounding islands generated from 10-meter Sentinel 2 imagery between 2022 and 2024. The dataset was created by the NESP MaC 3.17 project for the northern Australian Reef mapping initiative to clip reef features to land areas. It uses the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) on composite imagery from tides above mean sea level, approximating the mean high water level.

Use Cases

• Clipping the inshore edge of digitized fringing reef features to land areas based on the described automated coastline polygon.
• Analyzing coastal land area changes using the 2022-2024 temporal range and 10-meter spatial resolution mentioned in the description.
• Comparing coastline representations against other datasets like Geodata Coast 100K or DEA Coastline, as referenced in the description.

Strengths

• Positional error is specified to be below 50 meters, designed to avoid distorting small fringing reef shapes.
• Uses 10-meter resolution Sentinel 2 imagery from 2022 to 2024, providing recent and relatively high-resolution source data.
• Created for a specific mapping project (NESP MaC 3.17) with a clear application need, suggesting focused quality control.

Limitations

• The coastline corresponds to a spatially variable tidal height due to the satellite's sun-synchronous orbit and the composite method, making it less precise than pixel-level tidal calculations.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data format is listed as PNG and HTML, which may not be standard geospatial vector formats, potentially requiring conversion for GIS use.

Provenance

Source

Australian Ocean Data Network, part of the NESP MaC 3.17 project led by AIMS.

Collection Method

Generated from Sentinel 2 imagery using NDWI to distinguish land from water, with images selected where tide is above mean sea level and composited.

Time Range

2022 - 2024

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-28 20:51:16.522212; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Australian coastline and surrounding islands.