State of the Environment

2001

Coasts and Oceans Theme Report

Australia State of the Environment Report 2001 (Theme Report)
Australian State of the Environment Committee, Authors
Published by CSIRO on behalf of the Department of the Environment and Heritage, 2001
ISBN 0 643 06751 5

Marine and coastal management (continued)

The Australian Coastal Atlas [CO Indicator 7.12]

In May 1995 the Commonwealth Coastal Policy defined a need to establish an Australian Coastal Atlas (ACA) to help increase knowledge about Australia's coastal zone, and thus provide an accessible information base to support decision-making for coastal zone management.

The Atlas project commenced in 1997 in consultation with a wide forum of users and has resulted in a network of nodes delivering almost 900 data layers over the Internet. The Australian Coastal Atlas is a partnership arrangement between States, the Northern Territory and the Commonwealth. A diverse range of data is available at a variety of scales (1 :25 000 to 1 :1 000 000) to be mapped and queried, including: administrative boundaries, Indigenous sites, species distributions, aquaculture, bathymetry, marine habitats, cyclone tracks, beach safety and coastal regionalisations (see http://www.environment.gov.au/marine/coastal_atlas/ [accessed 5 September 2001]).