Victorian Coastal Cliff Assessment: Cliff Instability Areas for Present Day

ASTaR is a digital spatial dataset modeling cliff instability along the Victorian coastline under present-day sea-level conditions. The Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action produced this update, superseding the Stage 1 assessment, with a technical report dated 2025. Its 'building-block' approach combines geological unit type and cliff height to produce conservative, statewide-scale estimates of potential talus runout and erosion areas.

Use Cases

• Modeling potential coastal erosion exposure based on geological unit type and cliff height.
• Identifying areas susceptible to cliff instability and slumping based on a defined slope methodology.
• Conducting regional-scale hazard assessments for coastal management based on the 'upper bound', conservative results.

Strengths

• Dataset is an update superseding a previous Stage 1 assessment, indicating iterative improvement.
• Methodology explicitly combines individual parameters (geological unit type, cliff height, defined slope) for a 'building-block' approach.
• Available under a CC-BY-4.0 license, permitting broad reuse with attribution.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The product is explicitly not suitable for individual property-scale assessments, limiting its granular application.

Provenance

Source

Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action

Collection Method

Derived from modeled erosion scenarios based on geological unit type and cliff height.

Time Range

Present day (0.0m Sea Level Rise scenario).

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-14 21:45:12.557154; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Statewide / regional scale along the Victorian coastline, Australia.