Estuaries of New South Wales with Macrophyte Vegetation and Catchment Boundaries

New South Wales estuaries dataset contains the water boundary of each estuary up to its tidal limits, including areas vegetated with seagrass, mangrove, and saltmarsh. The data was created by the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, incorporating a tidal limits survey conducted between 1996 and 2005. It includes separate GIS layers for estuary drainage catchments and was developed for modeling physical characteristics and pressures on estuary health.

Use Cases

• Modeling catchment runoff based on defined fluvial and estuarine catchment boundaries.
• Calculating basic physical characteristics of estuaries such as area, depth, and volume based on water boundary and macrophyte extent.
• Developing chlorophyll response-based classification systems for estuaries based on normalized pressure data.
• Investigating causal relationships between catchment pressures and estuary health based on separate catchment layers.

Strengths

• Includes three distinct macrophyte types (seagrass, mangrove, saltmarsh) as specified in the description.
• Based on a tidal limits survey conducted over a nine-year period (1996-2005).
• Provides separate GIS spatial layers for estuary drainage catchment boundaries and polygons.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect temporal bias inherent to the 1996-2005 survey period.

Provenance

Source

NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water

Collection Method

A nine-stage method combining existing spatial data from multiple agencies and projects, developed through consultation.

Time Range

Survey data from 1996 to 2005.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-13 05:14:49.276306; freshness should be verified.

Geography

New South Wales, Australia.