Australia has established a network of 58 marine parks within Commonwealth waters covering a total of 3.3 million square kilometres, or 40 per cent of our exclusive economic zone (excluding Australian Antarctic Territory). These parks span a range of settings, from near coastal and shelf habitats to abyssal plains. Parks Australia manages the park network through management plans that came into effect for all parks on 1 July 2018. Geoscience Australia is contributing to their management by collating and interpreting existing environmental data, and through the collection of new marine data. “Eco-narrative” documents are being developed for those parks, where sufficient information is available, delivering collations and interpretations of seafloor geomorphology, oceanography and ecology. Many of these interpretations rely on bathymetric grids and their derived products, including those in this data release.

Bathymetry grids

The bathymetry of the marine parks was created by compiling and processing Geoscience Australia’s bathymetry data holding gridded at the optimum resolution depending of the vessel’s sonar system.

The bathymetry of the park is illustrated by a panchromatic geotiff image, developed by combining the bathymetric data with a hillshade image.

Morphological Surfaces

Geoscience Australia has developed a new marine seafloor classification scheme, which uses the two-part seafloor mapping morphology approach of Dove et al (2016). This new scheme is semi-hierarchical and the first step divides the slope of the seafloor into three Morphological Surface categories (Plain, <2°; Slope, 2-10°; Escarpment, >10°).

Dove, D., Bradwell, T., Carter, G., Cotterill, C., Gafeira, J., Green, S., Krabbendam, M., Mellet, C., Stevenson, A., Stewart, H., Westhead, K., Scott, G., Guinan, J., Judge, M. Monteys, X., Elvenes, S., Baeten, N., Dolan, M., Thorsnes, T., Bjarnadóttir, L., Ottesen, D. (2016). Seabed geomorphology: a twopart classification system. British Geological Survey, Open Report OR/16/001. 13 pages.

This research is supported by the National Environmental Science Program (NESP) Marine Biodiversity Hub through Project D1.