The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) High Values Collections (HVC) program has funded the establishment of an Australian seabed habitat classification scheme and spatial database, which we have named “Seamap Australia”.
Seamap Australia represents a number of outcomes a) the collation of all national benthic habitat mapping data into one location on infrastructure provided by the Australian Ocean Data Network (AODN) complete with metadata records, b) the syntheses of these datasets into one spatial data product using a newly proposed national benthic marine classification scheme for the Australian continental shelf and c) visualisation capacity via a web interface of the Seamap Australia spatial layer including a sample of biological data overlays.
The University of Tasmania has been well positioned to develop this spatial project. Previous IMAS projects like ‘SeaMap Tasmania’, ‘RedMap’ and ‘Reef Life Survey’ have generated awareness of what is possible when spatial data are made publicly available. We anticipate that Seamap Australia will enable national scale cross-disciplinary studies of continental shelf habitats. We hope that by bringing all of the marine habitat mapping data sets into one portal, and through highlighting the custodians of these data, that institutions are encouraged to work collaboratively to address nationwide solutions.
We look forward to this High Value Collection (HVC #19) inspiring researchers to share their marine habitat data through the AODN into the future, so that as the resource grows, we can continuously improve our knowledge of our marine estate.