Parks Australia's Natural Values Ecosystems (NESP MaC 1.3)

Brief description

The Parks Australia Management Effectiveness (ME) system - previously MERI - is underpinned by a controlled, common language that provides a nationally consistent lexicon for a) Natural, cultural, and heritage values; (b) Social, cultural, and economic benefits; (c) Activities and anthropogenic pressures; and (d) Biophysical, and social and economic drivers. The Natural Values component of the common language is defined at three levels: 1) ecosystem complexes; 2) ecosystems; and 3) ecosystem components. This map shows the Ecosystems (tier 2) component of the Natural Values, and delineates features by habitat and depth for the Australian Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). This version (2022) of the National Values Ecosystems dataset uses Geoscience Australia's 250m resolution Australian Bathymetry and Topography Grid, 2009 (http://dx.doi.org/10.4225/25/53D99B6581B9A) as the basis for the map. See Hayes et al. 2021 and Dunstan et al. 2023 for a full definition of Natural Values Ecosystem terms, input datasets used, and processing steps involved with the creation of this map. Note that this dataset uses a combination of input data sources and interpolates where data gaps exist. The common language adopts a functional, largely geo-physical perspective to define surrogates for marine ecosystems. This dataset is not a substitute for a validated habitat map (see Seamap Australia National Benthic Habitat Layer: https://metadata.imas.utas.edu.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/4739e4b0-4dba-4ec5-b658-02c09f27ab9a), but has a national coverage and provides valuable broad-scale categorisation of marine ecosystems in Australian waters.

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Maintenance and Update Frequency: asNeeded

Statement: Ecosystems were defined via a combination of depth and characteristic habitat, using Geoscience Australia's 250m resolution Australian Bathymetry and Topography Grid, 2009 (http://dx.doi.org/10.4225/25/53D99B6581B9A). From this a 16,411 row by 29,161 column raster of the commonwealth marine area (and adjacent state waters) was created, with 478,561,171 depth-labelled cells which were used to geo-locate the depth boundaries between different ecosystems. The map was created using a series of sequential applications of the Management Effectiveness common language definitions (see Hayes et al. 2021). For example, all cells in the depth rage 0-200m were initially identified as "shelf unvegetated sediments", and all cells in the depth range 200-700m assigned as "upper slope unvegetated sediments", and so forth. Reef, coral and vegetated ecosystems are then added to, and excised from, these regions. In this manner, ecosystem map layers were created for all the Common Language Ecosystems with the exclusion of beaches, intertidal coral reefs, islands and rocky shores. Information on the location of reefs/hard substrate was not available for either Norfolk or Macquarie Islands, which is a key data need to distinguish ecosystems. Due to this lack of data, the benthic area around Norfolk and Macquarie Islands were not mapped to the Ecosystems level. See Appendix C of Hayes et al 2021 (https://data.imas.utas.edu.au/attachments/NESP_pressures/PUBLICATIONS/MERI_report_final-SE-pilot-June-2021.pdf) for a full description of the process steps used to generate the Natural Values Ecosystems map.