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  • Wetlands provide a wide range of ecosystem services including improving water quality, carbon sequestration, as well as providing habitat for fish, amphibians, reptiles and birds. Managing wetlands in Australia is challenging due to competing pressures for water availability and highly variable climatic settings. The Wetlands Insight Tool (QLD) has been developed to provide catchment managers, environmental water holders, and wetlands scientists a consistent historical baseline of wetlands dynamics from 1987 onwards. The Wetlands Insight Tool (QLD) is available online through the Queensland Government Wetland What this product offers The Wetlands Insight Tool (QLD) summarises how the amount of water, green vegetation, dry vegetation and bare soil varies over time within each wetland. It provides the user with the ability to compare how the wetland is behaving now with how it has behaved in the past. This allows users to identify how changes in water availability have affected the wetland. It achieves this by presenting a combined view of Water Observations from Space, Tasseled Cap Wetness and Fractional Cover measurements from the Landsat series of satellites, summarised as a stacked line plot to show how that wetland has changed over time.

  • The tasseled cap index percentiles provide statistical (10th, 50th and 90th percentile) summaries of the tasseled cap wetness index from 1987 to 2017. They are intended for use as inputs into classification algorithms to identify potential wetlands, groundwater dependent ecosystems and characterise salt flats, clay pans, salt lakes and coastal land forms. For Landsat 5 TM, Landsat 7 ETM+ and Landsat 8 OLI data, the tasseled cap transforms are described in "Crist, E.P., 1985. A TM tasseled cap equivalent transformation for reflectance factor data. Remote Sensing of Environment, 17(3), pp.301-306."

  • Digital Earth Australia (DEA) is a key piece of public data infrastructure that uses images and information recorded by satellites orbiting our planet to detect physical changes across Australia in unprecedented detail. Landsat 5, 7 and 8 ‘analysis-ready’ data are currently available within DEA, where the raw satellite data have been corrected and orthorectified to enable easy interrogation of data across sensors. Geoscience Australia is developing techniques for analysing the data within DEA to identify wetlands and groundwater dependent ecosystems across northern Australia. These techniques include summarising observations of ‘wetness’ acquired over 30 years and linking these observations to gridded rainfall measurements to identity waterbodies and wetlands that persist during periods of low rainfall. These wetness summaries have been shown to correspond with known spring complexes in the Carmichael River catchment in Queensland, and have been used to improve the understanding of groundwater discharge processes within basalt provinces in the Upper Burdekin region in Queensland. This poster was submitted/presented to the 2018 Australian Geoscience Council Convention (AGCC) 14-18 October (https://www.agcc.org.au/)

  • Combining observations of open water, wet vegetation, and vegetation fractional cover allows us to observe the spatiotemporal behaviour of wetlands. We developed a Wetlands Insight Tool (WIT) using Analysis-Ready Data available through Digital Earth Australia that combines Water Observations from Space (WOfS), the Tasseled Cap Wetness Transform (TCW) and Fractional Cover into an asset drill. We demonstrate the tool on three Australian wetlands, showing changes in water and vegetation from bush fires, sand mining and planned recovery. This paper was submitted to/presented at the 2019 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS 2019) - https://igarss2019.org/

  • Background Wetlands provide a wide range of ecosystem services including improving water quality, carbon sequestration, as well as providing habitat for fish, amphibians, reptiles and birds. Managing wetlands in Australia is challenging due to competing pressures for water availability and highly variable climatic settings. The Wetlands Insight Tool (Ramsar Wetlands) has been developed to provide catchment managers, environmental water holders, andwetlands scientists a consistent historical baseline of wetlands dynamics from 1987 onwards. The Wetlands Insight Tool (Ramsar Wetlands) is available online through the DEA Mapswebsite. The Ramsar Wetlands of Australia Dataset is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia Licence. We created individual wetland polygons from the multipart Ramsar polygons in the dataset. The 6 Australian Ramsar Sites in external territories are excluded as they are outside of Australia’s satellite data footprint. What this product offers The Wetlands Insight Tool (Ramsar Wetlands) summarises how the amount of water, green vegetation, dry vegetation and bare soil varies over time within eachwetland boundary.It provides the user with the ability to compare how the wetland is behaving now with how it has behaved in the past. This allows users to identify how changes in water availability have affected the wetland.It achieves this bypresentinga combined view of Water Observations from Space (DEA Water Observations), Tasseled Cap Wetness (DEA Wetness Percentiles) and Fractional Cover (DEA Fractional Cover) measurements from the Landsat series of satellites, summarised as a stacked line plot to show how that wetlandhas changed over time.

  • <div>The Kati Thanda – Lake Eyre Basin (KT–LEB) covers about 1.2 million square kilometres of outback Australia. Although the basin is sparsely populated and relatively undeveloped it hosts nationally significant environmental and cultural heritage, including unique desert rivers, sweeping arid landscapes, and clusters of major artesian springs. The basin experiences climatic extremes that intermittently cycle between prolonged droughts and massive inland floods, with groundwater resources playing a critical role in supporting the many communities, industries, ecological systems, and thriving First Nations culture of the KT–LEB.</div><div><br></div><div>As part of Geoscience Australia’s National Groundwater Systems Project (in the Exploring for the Future Program) this report brings together contemporary data and information relevant to understanding the regional geology, hydrogeology and groundwater systems of Cenozoic rocks and sediments of the KT–LEB. This work represents the first whole-of-basin assessment into these vitally important shallow groundwater resources, which have previously received far less scientific attention than the deeper groundwater systems of the underlying Eromanga Basin (part of the Great Artesian Basin). The new knowledge and insights about the geology and hydrogeology of the basin generated by this study will benefit the many users of groundwater within the region and will help to improve sustainable management and use of groundwater resources across the KT–LEB.</div><div><br></div>

  • <div>Tasseled Cap percentiles provide an annual summary of how the environment has varied through a year. The Tasseled Cap percentiles provide the upper, lower and middle conditions as described by the 90th, 10th and 50th percentiles respectively, of greenness, wetness and brightness across the landscape.</div><div><br></div><div>These percentiles are intended for use as inputs into classification algorithms to identify such environmental features as wetlands and groundwater dependent ecosystems, and characterise salt flats, clay pans, salt lakes and coastal land forms.</div><div><br></div>

  • This specification describes the aggregation of jurisdictional data that is maintained by Geoscience Australia. Currently this data is made up of a mixture of scale ranging from 1:25,000 to 1:250,000 across the continent.

  • Background These are the statistics generated from the DEA Water Observations (Water Observations from Space) suite of products, which gives summaries of how often surface water was observed by the Landsat satellites for various periods (per year, per season and for the period from 1986 to the present). Water Observations Statistics (WO-STATS) provides information on how many times the Landsat satellites were able to clearly see an area, how many times those observations were wet, and what that means for the percentage of time that water was observed in the landscape. What this product offers Each dataset in this product consists of the following datasets: - Clear Count: how many times an area could be clearly seen (i.e. not affected by clouds, shadows or other satellite observation problems) - Wet Count: how many times water was detected inobservations that were clear - Water Summary: what percentage of clear observations were detected as wet (i.e. the ratio of wet to clear as a percentage) As no confidence filtering is applied to this product, it is affected by noise where misclassifications have occurred in the input water classifications, and can be difficult to interpret on its own. The confidence layer and filtered summary are contained in the Water Observations Filtered Statistics (WO-FILT-STATS) product, which provides a noise-reduced view of the all-of-time water summary. WO-STATS is available in multiple forms, depending on the length of time over which the statistics are calculated. At present the following are available: WO-STATS:statistics calculated from the full depth of time series (1986 to present) WO-STATS-ANNUAL:statistics calculated from each calendar year (1986 to present) WO-STATS-NOV-MAR:statistics calculated yearly from November to March (1986 to present) WO-STATS-APR-OCT:statistics calculated yearly from April to October (1986 to present)