Kimberley Marine Park 30-Meter Bathymetry and Morphological Surfaces

Geoscience Australia provides a 30-meter resolution bathymetric grid and derived morphological surface classification for the Kimberley Marine Park. The data supports the management of Australia's network of 58 marine parks, which cover 40 percent of the nation's exclusive economic zone. This release applies a semi-hierarchical seafloor classification scheme based on slope into Plain, Slope, and Escarpment categories.

Use Cases

• Classifying seafloor geomorphology based on the three Morphological Surface categories (Plain, Slope, Escarpment).
• Supporting marine park management and biodiversity research based on high-resolution bathymetry.
• Analyzing seabed slope characteristics for habitat mapping within the Kimberley Marine Park boundary.

Strengths

• High-resolution 30-meter bathymetric grid derived from a specified source model.
• Classification based on a published two-part seafloor mapping morphology approach (Dove et al., 2016).
• Data supports management of a park network covering 3.3 million square kilometres.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Freshness should be verified despite a last updated date of 2026-04-16.

Provenance

Source

Geoscience Australia, via the Australian Ocean Data Network and data_gov_au.

Collection Method

Collation and interpretation of existing environmental data, applying a new classification scheme to the Beaman and Spinoccia (2018) 30 m grid.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-16 09:07:59.096266

Geography

Kimberley Marine Park, within Commonwealth waters of Australia.