Established in 2018, AusSeabed is a collaborative national seabed mapping initiative focused on delivering freely accessible seabed mapping data and coordinating efforts to map the gaps across the Australian maritime region of responsibility. AusSeabed is driven by a cross-sector steering committee bringing together organisations from the government, academia and private sectors to ensure an inclusive and diverse representation of the seabed mapping community. The Annual Highlights Report presents the key achievements of the AusSeabed program over the 2021/22 financial year. The report is structured in five sections, the first four are aligned to the 2021/22 work plan objectives and the fifth highlights engagement activities over the past year.

This document presents an overview of the AusSeabed 2022/23 Work Plan created by the AusSeabed Steering Committee and endorsed by the AusSeabed Executive Board. The work plan builds on the great work delivered in 2021/22 (see the Annual Highlights Report & Annual Progress Report). For more information on the direction and vision of the program, please refer to the AusSeabed Strategy. For further information about AusSeabed see <a href="https://www.ausseabed.gov.au">https://www.ausseabed.gov.au</a>

<div>Australia’s vast marine estate offers high-quality offshore wind resources that have the potential to help produce the renewable energy that Australia will need to achieve its net zero emissions targets. Mature offshore renewable industries in Europe have demonstrated that marine geoscience is critical for supporting the sustainable development, installation, operation and decommissioning of offshore wind farms. Geoscience information is used to design targeted seabed surveys and identify areas suitable for offshore infrastructure, thereby reducing uncertainty and investment risk. These data also provide important regional context for environmental impact assessments and informs evidence-based decisions consistent with government policies and regulations. Effective geomorphic characterisation of the seabed requires a standardised, multi-scalar and collaborative approach to produce definitive geomorphology maps that can support these applications. These maps synthesise interpretations of bathymetry, shallow geology, sedimentology and ecology data, to illustrate the distribution and diversity of seabed features, compositions and processes, including sediment dynamics and seabed stability. We present mapped examples demonstrating the utility of a nationally consistent seabed geomorphology mapping scheme (developed in collaboration with European agencies), for application to a broad range of geographic settings and policy-needs, including the sustainable development of offshore renewable energy in Australia. Presented at the 2024 AMSA-NZMSS Conference Hobart Tas

Established in 2018, AusSeabed is a collaborative national seabed mapping initiative focused on delivering freely accessible seabed mapping data and coordinating efforts to map the gaps across the Australian maritime region of responsibility. AusSeabed is driven by a cross-sector steering committee bringing together organisations from the government, academia and private sectors to ensure an inclusive and diverse representation of the seabed mapping community. This Annual Progress Report provides a detailed account of the progress made against the AusSeabed program activities planned for 2021/22. A summary of highlights can be found in the Annual Highlights Report.

<div>Compared to its inherently unstable West Antarctic companion, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) as the largest ice mass on Earth, was long considered to react relatively robustly to external oceanic and/or atmospheric forcing. Many studies from recent years, however, revealed that ice masses in its marine-based portions such as the Wilkes and Aurora Subglacial Basins, which hold a potential sea-level equivalent of about 20 metres, may react just as sensitively. Currently, many outlet glaciers that connect into these deep hinterland basins are subject to significant ice flow acceleration and grounding-line retreat, hence may hint at potentially substantial ice losses in coming decades and centuries. Since those observations only cover a relatively short time period of several decades, it remains largely uncertain how the modern rapid changes in those sectors compare to ice sheet dynamics since the ice sheet’s last maximum extent some 20,000 years ago. Here, we report first results from newly acquired multibeam bathymetry, sediment echography and <em>in-situ</em> sediment core data from the Davis and Mawson Sea continental shelves, revealing major palaeo-ice stream troughs, grounding-line stabilization features, and extensive meltwater drainage systems. These new combined data will allow for establishing crucial spatiotemporal benchmarks for characterizing past ice sheet dynamics for these vulnerable EAIS portions, and with that deliver a needed framework for testing and validating palaeo-ice sheet models that ultimately aim at predicting their future response more reliably. Presented at the 29th International Polar Conference 'Dynamic Poles and High Mountain Environments'

The source code for the AusSeabed Survey Coordination Tool. Code is located at: https://github.com/ausseabed/survey-request-and-planning-tool The AusSeabed Survey Coordination tool (ASB SCT) is a tool designed by GA and FrontierSI in collaboration with the AusSeabed Steering Committee and broader community. Its intent is to provide a location for, and consistency in specification of bathymetric data acquisition for scientific research purposes. As of March 2022, the ASB SCT supports three key functions: 1) Survey Planning: the ASB SCT allows the community to publicise their plans to survey in the Austrlian Marine Estate. The tool ingests a spatial outline of the intended location as well as the target data types and focus for the survey. The tool also collects the contact details for the chief investigator and anticipated survey dates. Once published, the survey plan is visible on the upcoming surveys spatial layer on the AusSeabed portal. 2) Hydroscheme Industry Partnership Program Requests: the ASB SCT hosts the online form for submitting survey requests to the Australian Hydrographic Office (AHO) for consideration by the HydroScheme Industry Partnership Programme. 3) Areas of Interest submission: the ASB SCT ingests submissions that describe a users seabed mapping or biodiversity characterisation data needs and location. This information is useful in identifying regions of mutual interest and boosting collaborative multi-disciplinary surveys. Understanding regions with high levels of overlapping data needs can also help inform high-value survey activities and legacy data release priorities.