Commercial Vessel Transiting: Australian EEZ Traffic Summaries from AIS Data

A map of vessel traffic in the Australian Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) for the periods 2018/19 to 2022/23, including the current 2022/23 period. The data are summaries of vessel tracks from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority's Craft Tracking System, aggregated to the number of kilometers per 0.1-degree grid square. Each point in the underlying dataset represents a vessel position report with geographic coordinates and a UTC timestamp.

Use Cases

• Analyzing shipping density and corridors based on aggregated kilometers per grid square.
• Modeling vessel traffic patterns over time using the 2018/19 to 2022/23 time range.
• Assessing potential environmental or safety risks in Australia's Search and Rescue Region based on traffic summaries.
• Validating AIS data processing pipelines against summarized, gridded outputs from AMSA's systems.

Strengths

• Covers a multi-year period from 2018/19 to 2022/23, allowing for temporal trend analysis.
• Spatially defined for the Australian EEZ and Search and Rescue Region.
• Derived from authoritative sources including terrestrial and satellite AIS data via AMSA's Craft Tracking System.
• Data is aggregated to a standardized 0.1-degree grid for spatial analysis.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and total dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The description references data for November 2024, but the primary summary covers up to 2022/23, creating potential ambiguity about the latest records.

Provenance

Source

Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) via the Australian Ocean Data Network.

Collection Method

Summarized from vessel tracks between points identified by AUSREP or AIS, extracted from the Craft Tracking System (CTS) and Mariweb databases.

Time Range

2018/19 - 2022/23 (summary periods); underlying point data includes November 2024.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-13 20:53:08.872778; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Australian Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and Search and Rescue Region.