Australia's Identified Mineral Resources is an annual nation-wide assessment of Australia's ore reserves and mineral resources.

Australia's Identified Mineral Resources is an annual nation-wide assessment of Australia's ore reserves and mineral resources.

to come

Assessment of mineral potential in the Regional Forest Agreement Areas (RFAs) required collating mineral potential tract maps of individual deposit styles to produce composite, cumulative and weighted composite and cumulative maps. To achieve that an Avenue-script based ArcView extension was created to combine grids of mineral potential tract maps. The grids were combined to generate maps which showed either the highest (weighted or non-weighted) or cumulated (weighted or non-weighted) values. Resources and Advice Decision Support System (RADSS) combines features of the ArcView extension used in mineral potential assessments in RFAs and ASSESS. It is an ArcView extension with a 'Wizard'-like main dialog that leads the user through the process of creating an output. The system has the capacity to combine GIS-layers (raster and vector) to produce various mineral potential and other suitability maps.

This special issue of Continental Shelf Research presents 13 research papers that contain the latest results in the field of benthic marine environment mapping and seabed characterisation. A total of 10 papers in this special issue were presented as papers and posters at GeoHab conferences in 2007 (Noumea, New Caledonia), 2008 (Sitka, Alaska) and 2009 (Trondheim, Norway). The annual GeoHab conference provides a forum in which marine physical and biological scientists, managers, policy makers, and industry representatives can convene to engage in discussions regarding mapping and characterising the seabed. The papers contained in this special issue build on the work published in Greene and Todd (2005): Mapping the Seafloor for Habitat Characterization, a special publication of the Geological Association of Canada.

Geoscience Australia (GA) has a range of responsibilities in relation to uranium, including provision of technical advice into the Australian Government in support of policy development and decisions on new uranium projects. This presentation illustrates this role in relation to the Australian Government policy that uranium mining be approved subject to world's best practice environmental and safety standards. It discusses the technical advisory produced by GA in 2008 on what this means for in situ leach (ISL) uranium mining in Australia, with particular reference to the Beverley Project in South Australia. This advice was produced for the Departments of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (DEWHA) and Resources, Energy and Tourism (RET), and involved consultation with South Australian Government officials. It drew on experience from ISL mines around the world and made the point that there is not a fixed template for world best practice because the characteristics of individual ore bodies determine the best practice for leaching solutions, well-field technology, uranium recovery, liquid waste management and rehabilitation. Currently, there is a process in train to build on this earlier work to produce formal guidance on best practice ISL in Australia, under a steering group comprising Australian, South Australian, Northern Territory and Western Australian government officials.

Australia has a three-tiered hierarchal model of government. A single Federal government, eight State/Territory governments and approximately seven hundred municipal councils make up the three tiers. Each of these tiers, and the separate jurisdictions within the tiers, can have their own standards and arrangements for managing information useful for Emergency Management (EM). Other information resources are held by private organisations. The business drivers for a co-ordinated national approach to `data collection, research and analysis?? was identified by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) review and documented in their report `Natural Disasters in Australia ? Reforming mitigation, relief, and recovery arrangements? in 2001 (released in August 2002). Representatives of all tiers of governments were signatories to this report. Later in 2001 the events in New York on September 11 reinforced the business drivers for access to data that transcends jurisdictional boundaries, as did the 2003 bushfires in Canberra. Against this backdrop there are several projects that are addressing the infrastructure and data requirements at the state/territory level. The `LIST? in Tasmania. `VicMap? in Victoria, the `EICU? project in NSW, the `SIS? project in Queensland, the `SLIP? project in Western Australia and the ESA CAD system in the ACT are examples of spatial information Infrastructure initiatives that partially support EM at the jurisdictional level. At the national level the Australian & New Zealand Land Information Council (ANZLIC) proposed a national Distributed Spatial Data Library in 2003. Previous attempts to create centralised repositories have failed but maturing web services and the ability to produce hard-copy maps on-demand have moved this concept to a practical reality. Underpinning the distributed library is the development of a community `All Hazards? Data Taxonomy/Model for the EM community. The majority of the state jurisdictions provided input to the taxonomy, while additional expertises in the modelling and socio-economic domains were provided by Geoscience Australia (GA). The data identified by the taxonomy is sourced from varied and complex sources and formatted into a simplified, coherent form suitable for Emergency Management. The benefits of sharing data through a standardised framework are being progressively demonstrated to organisations through the ability to provide early warning of threats to their assets and services, while ensuring they maintain control of their data. There are still many hurdles to overcome before an infrastructure to support a Distributed Spatial Data Library can be realised. These hurdles can be broadly categorised as technological and cultural. The technological hurdles are no longer a significant barrier as bandwidth steadily increases, and major GIS systems support web service based data integration. It is arguably the cultural hurdles that are the most difficult. The process of consultation and review used in creating the `All Hazards? taxonomy has created a realisation among the jurisdictions of the benefits of closer ties and co-operation in data sharing and delivery arrangements. There is still some distance to travel but the implementation of an Australian Distributed Spatial Data Library for Emergency Management is moving closer to reality.

This map shows Western Australian and Commonwealth fishing closures, marine conservation areas and maritime boundaries for the area from Esperance to the South Australian border. It has been produced for the National Oceans Office.

Australia's Identified Mineral Resources is an annual nation-wide assessment of Australia's ore reserves and mineral resources.

This map shows Western Australian and Commonwealth fishing closures, marine conservation areas and maritime boundaries for the area from Perth south, then east past Albany. It has been produced for the National Oceans Office.