Australian Marine Parks and Zoning with Management and IUCN Classifications

Parks Australia manages this spatial dataset of Commonwealth Marine Parks. It contains zoning information for marine parks across multiple Australian marine regions, including the North, North-west, South-west, Temperate East, and Coral Sea, building on the South-east network declared in 2007. The data includes attributes for network name, reserve name, management zone type, IUCN category, and calculated area, with a noted technical amendment from April 2019 affecting the Macquarie Island Marine Park area calculation.

Use Cases

• Analyze the spatial distribution of different management zones based on the Zone attribute.
• Calculate total protected area by network or region using the Area_km2 attribute.
• Map conservation categories by applying symbology based on the NatLegend attribute.
• Assess the representation of IUCN protected area categories across marine regions using the ZoneIUCN attribute.

Strengths

• Attributes are described as authoritative, including NetName, ResName, Zone, ZoneIUCN, and Area_km2.
• Data covers multiple proclaimed marine park networks across five major Australian marine regions.
• A specific technical amendment concerning a 483km2 area under-reporting for Macquarie Island is documented.

Limitations

• Data excludes marine protected areas from other Australian jurisdictions like the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park or State/Territory parks.
• The dataset was last updated in April 2019, which may affect temporal relevance.
• Row count and total number of features are unknown, limiting scale assessment.

Provenance

Source

Parks Australia, Commonwealth Government (Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999), with Heard Island and McDonald Islands Marine Reserve managed by the Australian Antarctic Division.

Collection Method

Proclaimed under legislation; metadata is a non-authoritative extract maintained for the eAtlas.

Freshness

Data updated April 30th 2019; metadata last updated 2026-07-10.

Geography

Commonwealth waters of Australia, including the North, North-west, South-west, Temperate East, Coral Sea, and South-east Marine Regions, plus Heard Island and McDonald Islands.