Australian Coastline 50K 2024: Land Polygons from Sentinel 2 Imagery

Australian Coastline 50K 2024 is a land area polygon dataset for the Australian coastline and surrounding islands. It was generated from 10-meter resolution Sentinel 2 imagery from 2022 to 2024 using the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) to distinguish land from water. The dataset was created by the NESP MaC 3.17 project to support the mapping of northern Australian reefs.

Use Cases

• Clip digitized fringing reef features to land areas based on the dataset's purpose of automating coastline clipping.
• Analyze coastal land changes using the 10-meter Sentinel 2 imagery source from 2022-2024.
• Compare coastline representations against other datasets like Geodata Coast 100K 2004 or the Australian Hydrographic Office dataset.
• Support marine spatial planning with a polygon representation of the coastline approximating the mean high water level.

Strengths

• Derived from 10-meter resolution Sentinel 2 satellite imagery.
• Designed with an edge positional error below 50 meters to avoid distorting small fringing reef shapes.
• Created specifically to address limitations of existing coastline datasets which were either too coarse or had positional errors around 80 meters.

Limitations

• The coastline corresponds to a spatially variable tidal height, as images were selected only for being above mean sea level without full tidal accommodation.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Australian Ocean Data Network, associated with the NESP MaC 3.17 project and AIMS.

Collection Method

Generated from composite Sentinel 2 imagery (2022-2024) using NDWI, with a processing approach adapted from Bishop-Taylor et al., 2021.

Time Range

2022 to 2024

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-10 15:55:35.107994; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Australian coastline and surrounding islands