Authors / CoAuthors
Unknown
Abstract
The data set provides outlines for the maximum extent of the benthic Biomes of Australia's Exclusive Economic Zone for regions beyond the shelf break not including the offshore island territories and Australian Antarctic Territory. These data were compiled in 2004 as part of the draft national benthic marine bioregionalisation which is designed to provide improved knowledge of Australia's seabed. The Biomes represent bio-geographic regions that capture narrow spatial distributions and depth ranges in benthic faunal distributions, based on the assumption that the demersal fish distributions are a surrogate of marine faunal distributions. The narrow spatial distributions were revealed as strong patterns of bathymetric zoning for key indicator species on the upper to mid slope. Due to available data, biomes were only defined in water depths of <1,130 m. A total of three biomes were defined: upper slope, mid-upper slope, and mid slope. Each of the biomes is separated by a biotone. The Biomes data set includes the names of units in the attribute table as well as the area and perimeter of each unit.
Product Type
dataset
eCat Id
77171
Contact for the resource
Custodian
Point of contact
Cnr Jerrabomberra Ave and Hindmarsh Dr GPO Box 378
Canberra
ACT
2601
Australia
Keywords
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- GIS Dataset
- ( Theme )
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- marine
- Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC)
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- Earth Sciences
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- Published_Internal
Publication Date
2013-08-21T00:00:00
Creation Date
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Status
Purpose
Maintenance Information
asNeeded
Topic Category
geoscientificInformation
Series Information
Lineage
The Biomes were defined in 2004 as part of a program run by Geoscience Australia, CSIRO Marine Research and the National Oceans Office to create a spatial inventory of large-scale benthic biogeographical regions for Australia's Exclusive Economic Zone. The Biomes were defined by the strong depth structuring on the mid to upper slope in key indicator demersal fishes. The depth structuring on the slope was determined from an analysis of the regional structure in demersal fishes carried out by CSRIO Marine Research (Last et al., 2004). The final boundaries were generated by intersecting the biome depths with the 250 m spatial resolution bathymetry model for the Australian EEZ using an ARC GIS. This produced the two dimensional biome polygons. The resulting boundaries defined the separate polygons and they were stored as an ARC/GIS shape file.
Parent Information
Extents
[-55.0, -9.0, 90.0, 175.0]
Reference System
Spatial Resolution
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