Australia National Base Map: Topographic Color Mapping for Mainland and Territories

A seamless topographic color map service covering all of Australia, its outer islands, and external territories. The data is sourced from Geoscience Australia, the Australian Antarctic Division, and OpenStreetMap, with contributions from other government departments. The map portrays cultural, hydrography, marine, transport, vegetation, and relief themes, with some data last checked in 2008-2009.

Use Cases

• Create detailed topographic visualizations based on the described cultural, hydrography, and relief themes.
• Analyze land use and vegetation patterns based on the aggregated ACLUMP vegetation layer.
• Develop multi-scale mapping applications based on the described data sources (e.g., GEODATA TOPO 250K beyond 1:100,000 scale, OpenStreetMap from 1:100,000).
• Integrate bathymetric data for coastal studies based on the sourced Natural Earth imagery.

Strengths

• Covers the entire Australian continent, its outer islands, and external territories, providing national-scale coverage.
• Integrates data from multiple authoritative sources including Geoscience Australia, Australian Antarctic Division, and OpenStreetMap.
• Includes specific high-resolution mapping datasets for Christmas Island (1:30,000 scale) and Cocos (Keeling) Islands (1:25,000 scale).

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Topographic information was checked in 2008-2009 with limited field checking, so some features may not be accurate.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale quantitative analysis.

Provenance

Source

Geoscience Australia, Australian Antarctic Division, OpenStreetMap, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Natural Earth.

Collection Method

Compiled from multiple topographic mapping datasets, satellite imagery, and contributed sources.

Time Range

Data checked in 2008-2009; SRTM data acquired February 2000; suburbs data from 2018 and 2020.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-20 02:04:35.998599; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Australia, including Norfolk, Lord Howe, Macquarie Islands, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Christmas Island, Heard and McDonald Islands, and the Australian Antarctic Territory.