NESP MaC Project 5.10: Australian Marine Parks Socio-Ecological Survey Data

Parks Australia manages 60 Australian Marine Parks covering 3.8 million square kilometres. This project redesigned two repeatable national surveys to gather socio-economic information, including a boat ramp survey at nine locations and a general public survey, to support management effectiveness assessments and the 2028 management plan review. Outputs include aggregated survey responses and a final technical report.

Use Cases

• Benchmarking recreational fisher knowledge and practices based on the boat ramp survey
• Tracking changes in public awareness and attitudes towards marine parks since the 2019/20 benchmark
• Supporting integrated reporting on social and ecological values for the 2028 management plan review

Strengths

• Focuses on 60 Australian Marine Parks covering 43% of Australian waters
• Builds on a 2019/20 benchmark, enabling longitudinal analysis of changes
• Survey design supports park- and network-scale estimates across five major marine park networks

Limitations

• Only aggregated survey outputs are publicly available, limiting granular analysis
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment

Provenance

Source

Australian Ocean Data Network

Collection Method

Redesigned national surveys: a boat ramp survey targeting recreational users and a general public survey.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-04 14:58:03.203114; freshness should be verified

Geography

Australian Marine Parks, including the Coral Sea, North, North-west, South-west, South-east, and Temperate East networks.