Victoria Marine Habitat Map 2023 with 24 Habitat Complexes

Victoria's statewide marine and coastal habitats are mapped at a 10-meter resolution using a Random Forest model with 89% accuracy. The map integrates 32,998 ground-truth survey sites and synthesizes 17% of its area from existing higher-resolution mapping products. It was developed by the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA) and published in 2023.

Use Cases

• Modeling marine habitat distribution based on 28 environmental properties like sea surface temperature and sediment type.
• Assessing coastal biodiversity and conservation planning using the 24 habitat complexes from the CBiCS classification.
• Validating and improving predictive habitat models based on the 89% out-of-bag accuracy metric and 32,998 ground-truth records.
• Integrating legacy habitat mapping data from sources like Port Phillip Bay and Western Port for a unified state view.

Strengths

• Model accuracy is reported as 89% (Out-of-bag) from the Random Forest algorithm.
• Integrates 32,998 habitat survey sites for ground-truthing and 28 environmental variables at 10m resolution.
• Combines predictive modeling (83% of area) with a synthesis of 13+ existing, higher-resolution mapping products.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for specific analytical tasks.

Provenance

Source

Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA), Victoria.

Collection Method

Created by applying a Random Forest machine learning model to environmental data and synthesizing existing habitat maps.

Time Range

2023

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04 09 08:49:13.303949; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Statewide marine and coastal waters of Victoria, Australia.