On 7 February 2009, wildfires swept through the southern Australian state of Victoria, resulting in Australia's most damaging natural disaster. The scale and intensity of the Victorian fires tragically resulted in the loss of more than 170 lives and the destruction of around 3,500 buildings, of which 2,000 were houses. The burning of 450,000 ha (1,100,000 acres) resulted in severe damage to the natural and buit environment. Tasked with the unique role of geological survey for a continent, Geoscience Australia provides first class geoscientific information and knowledge. This knowledge assists government and the community to make informed public policy decisions about resources, environment and inftrastructure, affecting the wellbeing of all Australians. Recent events in Australia have led to spatial input from the Agency into hazards, change detection, natural risk assessment and emergency management. Future areas with potential for Earth Observation data application will be part of the International Geological Congress to be held in Brisbane, Australia in 2012. The application of Geoscience in Australia will lbe showcased at the IGC through a number of thematic sessions.

This map is part of the series that covers the whole of Australia at a scale of 1:250 000 (1cm on a map represents 2.5 km on the ground) and comprises 513 maps. This is the largest scale at which published topographic maps cover the entire continent. Each standard map covers an area of 1.5 degrees longitude by 1 degree latitude or about 150 kilometres from east to west and 110 kilometres from north to south. There are about 50 special maps in the series and these maps cover a non-standard area. Typically, where a map produced on standard sheet lines is largely ocean it is combined with its landward neighbour. These maps contain natural and constructed features including road and rail infrastructure, vegetation, hydrography, contours (interval 50m), localities and some administrative boundaries. The topographic map and data index shows coverage of the sheets. Product Specifications Coverage: The series covers the whole of Australia with 513 maps. Currency: Ranges from 1995 to 2009. 95% of maps have a reliability date of 1994 or later. Coordinates: Geographical and either AMG or MGA (post-1993) Datum: AGD66, GDA94, AHD. Projection: Universal Traverse Mercator (UTM) Medium: Paper, flat and folded copies.

Article

Spatial interpolation methods have been applied to many disciplines. Many factors affect the performance of the methods, but there are no consistent findings about their effects. In this study, we focus mainly on comparative studies in environmental sciences to assess the performance of spatial interpolation methods and to quantify the impacts of data properties on the performance. Two new measures are proposed to compare the performance of the methods applied to multiple variables with different units/scales. A total of 53 comparative studies were assessed and the performance of 61 methods/sub-methods compared in these studies is analysed. The impacts of sample density, data variation, and sampling design on the estimations of 32 methods are quantified using data derived from their application to 80 variables. Inverse distance weighting (IDW), ordinary kriging (OK), and ordinary co-kriging (OCK) are the most frequently used methods. Data variation is a dominant factor and has significant impacts on the performance of the methods. As the variation increases, the accuracy of all methods decreases and the magnitude of decrease is method dependent. Gradient plus inverse distance squared (GIDS), OCK and regression residual kriging (RK-C) are less sensitive to data variation. Irregular-spaced sampling design might improve the accuracy of estimation. The effect of sampling density on the performance of the methods is found not to be significant. The implications of these findings are discussed.

The Australian Government formally releases new offshore exploration areas at the annual APPEA conference. This year, thirty-one areas plus two special areas in five offshore basins are being released for work program bidding. Closing dates for bid submissions are either six or twelve months after the release date, i.e. 3 December 2009 and 29 April 2010, depending on the exploration status in these areas is and on data availability. The 2009 Release Areas are located in Commonwealth waters offshore Northern Territory, Western Australia, South Australia and Victoria, comprising intensively explored areas close to existing production as well as new frontiers. As usual, the North West Shelf features very prominently and is complimented by new areas along the southern margin, including frontier exploration areas in the Ceduna Sub-basin (Bight Basin) and the Otway Basin. The Bonaparte Basin is represented by one Release Area in the Malita Graben, while five areas are available in the Southern Browse Basin in the under-explored part of that basin. A total of 14 areas are being released in the Carnarvon Basin, located within the Dampier Sub-basin, (eight areas), the Rankin Platform (three small blocks) and the Northern Exmouth Plateau (three large blocks) which is considered a deep water frontier. In the south, six large areas are on offer in the Ceduna Sub-basin and five areas of varying sizes are being released in the Otway Basin, including a deep water frontier offshore Victoria. The Special Release Areas are located in the Petrel Sub-basin, Bonaparte Basin offshore Northern Territory, and encompass the Turtle/Barnett oil discoveries.

Abstract submitted to the Specialist Group in Geochemistry, Mineralogy and Petrology conference, to be held on Kangaroo Island, Nov 2009

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.

This map shows the boundary of the Maritime Security Zones for each port for the purpose of the Maritime Transport & Office Security Act 2003 15 Sheets (Colour) December 2009 Not for sale or public distribution Contact Manager LOSAMBA project, PMD

Quarterly column on issues in Australian stratigraphy

Geoscience Australia undertakes classification of biophysical datasets to create seabed habitat maps (termed 'seascapes') for the Australian margin and adjacent sea floor. Seascapes describe a layer of ecologically meaningful biophysical properties that spatially represents potential seabed habitats. Each seascape area corresponds to a region of the seabed that contains similar biophysical properties and, by association, potential habitats and communities. The lack of available standardised biological data at the national scale precludes the integration of biological information into the derivation of national seascapes. By focusing on a much smaller scale over tens of kilometres near the Glomar Shoals in Western Australia, referred to as 'local scale', available biological data were integrated into new derivations of seascapes and results compared with seascapes without these data. Using physical data as described in Whiteway et al. 2007 (GA Record 2007/11) and demersal fish data obtained from the 1967 Russian Berg-3 survey, we have derived four new local sets of seascape to compare the effects of integrating biological data: 1) Standard seascapes using only physical data, 2) Seascapes with an additional biology layer based on the Shannon diversity index, 3) Seascapes with an additional biology layer based on the Simpson diversity index, and 4) Seascapes with an additional layer of randomly-generated data. At the 'regional-scale' we derived two sets of seascapes: 1) Seascapes with an additional biology layer based on the Shannon diversity index that encompasses the entire Berg-3 survey area in northwest Australia, and 2) Standard seascapes using only physical data for the same area. This datsets is the local scale Glomar Shoals seascape produced with a biological layer called the 'Shannon Diversity Index'.