National Base Map: Greyscale Topography for Australia

National Base Map - Greyscale WMTS is a web map tile service produced by Geoscience Australia for the National Map project. It provides seamless greyscale topographic mapping for the entirety of Australia, including external territories like Cocos (Keeling) Islands and Norfolk Island. The service integrates Geoscience Australia data at smaller scales with OpenStreetMap data at larger scales and contains layer scale dependencies.

Use Cases

• Creating reference maps for national planning based on seamless topographic coverage.
• Performing spatial analysis over Australia and its territories using a standardized basemap.
• Visualizing geographic features at different zoom levels due to integrated data from Geoscience Australia and OpenStreetMap.
• Supporting the National Map project with a foundational greyscale mapping layer.

Strengths

• Provides complete coverage of Australia, including its external territories.
• Integrates authoritative data from Geoscience Australia with detailed crowd-sourced data from OpenStreetMap.
• Is actively maintained, with updates recorded in mid-2026.

Limitations

• Metadata is incomplete; specific column names, row counts, file size, and license details are not provided.
• The service description is repeated verbatim across multiple platform entries, suggesting limited descriptive depth.
• The exact date of the underlying data is unclear, with only service update timestamps provided.

Provenance

Source

Geoscience Australia Data, OpenStreetMap

Collection Method

Produced as a web map tile service (WMTS) for the National Map project.

Freshness

2026-06-09 04:38:01.584867

Geography

Australia, including Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Christmas Island, Norfolk Island, and Lord Howe Island.