Australian Water Resource Dams: Locations and Capacities from 1996-1999

Australia's water availability dams and their storage capacities. The dataset contains the spatial location, unique identifiers, and names of dams, with total capacity data for Surface Water Management Areas. It was compiled by the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and last updated in April 2026.

Use Cases

• Map water storage infrastructure across Australia based on the provided spatial locations.
• Analyze regional water storage capacity based on the total capacity data for Surface Water Management Areas.
• Model water availability scenarios using the dam identifiers and attributes.
• Integrate dam locations into environmental or hydrological GIS models.

Strengths

• Data is geospatial, provided in multiple GIS formats (GEOJSON, SHP, WFS, WMS).
• Includes specific temporal coverage for capacity data (1996/99).
• Released under a permissive CC-BY-4.0 license.
• Sourced from an authoritative government department.

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 1996-1999 collection period.

Provenance

Source

Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES), Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.

Collection Method

Locations and attributes were entered into a database by each Australian State and Territory.

Time Range

Capacity data reflects the 1996/99 period.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-04 18:11:50.467001; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Australia (national coverage).