Parks Australia Natural Values Ecosystems: Marine Habitat Map for Australian EEZ

Parks Australia's 2022 map delineates marine ecosystems by habitat and depth across the Australian Exclusive Economic Zone. It uses a 250-meter resolution bathymetry grid from Geoscience Australia as its base and provides a nationally consistent, broad-scale categorization. The dataset is part of the National Environmental Science Program's Marine and Coastal Hub.

Use Cases

• Modeling marine habitat distribution based on depth and geo-physical surrogates.
• Assessing national-scale ecosystem coverage for conservation planning.
• Integrating broad-scale environmental layers for marine management effectiveness monitoring.

Strengths

• National coverage across the Australian Exclusive Economic Zone.
• Based on a 250-meter resolution bathymetry grid.
• Uses a controlled, nationally consistent lexicon for ecosystem classification.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The description notes it is not a substitute for a validated habitat map.

Provenance

Source

Australian Ocean Data Network

Collection Method

Combination of input data sources with interpolation for gaps, adopting a functional geo-physical perspective.

Time Range

2022 version

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-04 13:53:22.609632; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Australian Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ)