Water Sharing Plan: In-Force Legal Boundaries for NSW Water Sources

New South Wales, Australia, maintains legally binding Water Sharing Plans (WSPs) under the Water Management Act 2000. This dataset provides aggregated geospatial boundaries for in-force Groundwater Sources, Unregulated River Sources, Regulated River Sources, and their Management Zones. The plans establish rules for water extraction and are intended to be updated as plans commence or are amended.

Use Cases

• Determining applicable water extraction rules based on a property's location.
• Assessing regulatory compliance for agricultural or industrial water users.
• Planning environmental impact studies within defined water source boundaries.
• Visualizing the spatial extent of regulated versus unregulated water sources.

Strengths

• Contains legally binding plan boundaries with direct regulatory application.
• Includes detailed lineage tracking specific amendments and corrections up to February 2026.
• Covers multiple water source types: groundwater, unregulated rivers, and regulated rivers.

Limitations

• Critical metadata such as column names, row count, size, and license are explicitly listed as 'unknown' or 'None' across all sources.
• The description is repeated verbatim across multiple platform entries, suggesting potential for stale or non-differentiated metadata.
• The lineage indicates a 'best endeavours aggregation', which may imply some level of approximation in the boundary depiction.

Provenance

Source

Spatial Services (DCS), New South Wales government.

Collection Method

Best endeavours aggregation and depiction of in-force Water Sharing Plans.

Time Range

Plans are in place for 10-year terms but are amended; lineage notes specific updates from October 2024 to February 2026.

Freshness

Last updated on data.gov.au: 2026-05-28.

Geography

New South Wales, Australia.