Product catalogue
DEA Coastal Ecosystems
<div>Mapping coastal ecosystems is vital for understanding, managing, and protecting the diverse habitats that line our shorelines. These ecosystems—ranging from mangroves and saltmarshes to seagrass meadows and coral reefs—provide essential environmental services, including carbon storage, coastal protection, and habitat for marine biodiversity. From an economic standpoint, they sustain industries such as fisheries and tourism while reducing costs associated with coastal erosion and storm damage. Accurate and comprehensive mapping underpins management, restoration, and conservation efforts, allowing planners to identify priority areas, monitor ecological change, and assess the effectiveness of interventions.</div><div><br></div><div>Achieving this at a continental scale, however, poses significant challenges. Traditional methods such as field surveys, aerial photography, and local-scale sampling are costly, labour-intensive, and constrained in spatial and temporal scope—limitations that are particularly relevant in a country as vast and remote as Australia. Earth Observation (EO) provides an efficient and consistent alternative, allowing large-scale, high-resolution, and repeatable mapping through the use of publicly available satellite imagery.</div><div><br></div><div>The <strong>Digital Earth Australia (DEA) Coastal Ecosystems</strong> product suite ( https://knowledge.dea.ga.gov.au/data/product/dea-coastal-ecosystems/) is the first national dataset to simultaneously map Australia’s mangrove, saltmarsh, intertidal, and intertidal seagrass ecosystems at 10 m resolution, using annual time-series of Sentinel-2 satellite imagery for consistent mapping at a continental scale. </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><strong>Applications</strong></div><div><br></div><div>- National Environmental Ecosystem Accounts</div><div>- National and Regional State of the Environment reporting</div><div>- A complementary mapping product to fill spatial and temporal gaps in higher resolution expert mapping (aerial and drone mapping, field surveys)</div><div>- Future integration with other terrestrial and ocean data sets (e.g. Land Cover and Marine Tenure)</div><div>- Coastal protection and Hazard modelling</div><div><br></div><div><br></div>
Simple
Identification info
- Date (Creation)
- 2025-12-03T11:00:00
- Date (Publication)
- 2025-12-15T23:34:01.796Z
- Citation identifier
- Geoscience Australia Persistent Identifier/https://pid.geoscience.gov.au/dataset/ga/150770
Identifier
- Cited responsible party
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Role Organisation / Individual Name Details Publisher Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)
Voice Author Phillips, C.
Internal Contact Author Newey, V.
Internal Contact Author Lyons, M.
External Contact Author Sagar, S.
Internal Contact Author Bishop-Taylor, R.
Internal Contact
- Purpose
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The DEA Coastal Ecosystems product suite maps the extent of coastal ecosystems within Australia’s coastal zone, with a focus on those situated landward of the low-tide boundary. Developed using Sentinel-2 data, the product suite provides an annual 10 m resolution extent classification layer for four ecosystem classes, enabling users to better monitor and understand the distribution of these ecosystems at a continental scale. The classification layer is supported by ecosystem probability layers for each class, to allow a more nuanced interpretation of the modelled ecosystem extents and to provide users flexibilty for tailored mapping approaches. The mapping process employs a machine learning (ML) framework originally developed by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and James Cook University (JCU) for global coastal ecosystem mapping on the Google Earth Engine platform (Murray et al., 2022). To tailor the approach for Australian conditions, JCU — commissioned by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) — compiled a national training dataset of more than 40,000 annotated points across the continent (Canto et al., 2023; Becker et al., 2023). This collaboration ensures the resulting maps are ecologically meaningful and complementary to expert mapping undertaken by State Governments and academia, providing a strong foundation for environmental management and reporting, restoration planning, environmental-economic accounting, and long-term coastal conservation.
- Status
- Completed
- Point of contact
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Role Organisation / Individual Name Details Resource provider Space Division
External Contact Point of contact Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)
Voice Point of contact Sagar, S.
Internal Contact
- Spatial representation type
- Topic category
-
- Geoscientific information
Extent
))
Temporal element
- Time period
- 2021-01-01 2022-12-31
- Maintenance and update frequency
- As needed
Resource format
- Title
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Product data repository: Various Formats
- Protocol
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FILE:DATA-DIRECTORY
- Name of the resource
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Data Store directory containing the digital product files
- Description
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Data Store directory containing one or more files, possibly in a variety of formats, accessible to Geoscience Australia staff only for internal purposes
- Keywords
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Ecosystem Mapping
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- Keywords
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Coastal Habitats
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- Keywords
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Intertidal
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- Keywords
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Digital Earth Australia
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- Keywords
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Earth Observation
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- Keywords
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Machine Learning
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- theme.ANZRC Fields of Research.rdf
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Earth and space science informatics
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- Keywords
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Published_External
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Resource constraints
- Title
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence
- Alternate title
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CC-BY
- Edition
-
4.0
- Access constraints
- License
- Use constraints
- License
- Other constraints
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© Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia) 2025
Resource constraints
- Title
-
Australian Government Security Classification System
- Edition date
- 2018-11-01T00:00:00
- Classification
- Unclassified
- Classification system
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Australian Government Security Classification System
- Language
- English
- Character encoding
- UTF8
Distribution Information
- OnLine resource
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Link to data
ga_s2_coastalecosystems_cyear_3_v1
- OnLine resource
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Link to DEA Knowledge Hub
Link to DEA Knowledge Hub
Distribution Information
- Distributor contact
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Role Organisation / Individual Name Details Distributor Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)
Voice
Resource lineage
- Statement
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<div>DEA Coastal Ecosystems was initiated as a collaborative project to support the Commonwealth Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) to underpin the creation of Environmental Economic Accounts (EEA) for ecosystems in Australia’s coastal zone. This followed experimental Ocean Accounts, delivered in 2022 and based on selected individual ecosystem earth observation derived datasets.</div><div><br></div><div>Leveraging a methodology that mapped global shifts in tidal wetlands (Murray, et al. 2022 - https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abm9583), Geoscience Australia has collaborated with James Cook University and the University of New South Wales to deliver a similar approach for Australia in the DEA Coastal Ecosystems product suite. Initial Beta versions of the product were used to underpin the February 2025 release of the National Ecosystem Accounts experimental estimates for the Coastal Realm, with the first V1.0.0 release of the DEA Coastal Ecosystems product suite expected to contribute to the upcoming 2026 National Ecosystem Account released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div>
Reference System Information
Identifier
- Code
- EPSG:3577
- Description
-
GDA94 / Australian Albers (EPSG:3577)
Metadata constraints
- Title
-
Australian Government Security Classification System
- Edition date
- 2018-11-01T00:00:00
- Classification
- Unclassified
Metadata
- Metadata identifier
-
urn:uuid/bf7d0ec1-16fe-436e-85d5-2dce65475084
- Title
-
GeoNetwork UUID
- Language
- English
- Character encoding
- UTF8
- Contact
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Role Organisation / Individual Name Details Point of contact Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)
Voice Point of contact Sagar, S.
Internal Contact
Type of resource
- Resource scope
- Dataset
Alternative metadata reference
- Title
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Geoscience Australia - short identifier for metadata record with uuid
- Citation identifier
- eCatId/150770
- Metadata linkage
-
https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/api/records/bf7d0ec1-16fe-436e-85d5-2dce65475084
- Date info (Creation)
- 2025-11-20T11:09:48.453Z
- Date info (Revision)
- 2025-12-15T23:31:37.244Z
Metadata standard
- Title
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AU/NZS ISO 19115-1:2014
Metadata standard
- Title
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ISO 19115-1:2014
Metadata standard
- Title
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ISO 19115-3
- Title
-
Geoscience Australia Community Metadata Profile of ISO 19115-1:2014
- Edition
-
Version 2.0, September 2018
- Citation identifier
- https://pid.geoscience.gov.au/dataset/ga/122551