Mapping Australia’s seabed is critical to support offshore planning, environmental stewardship, and emerging blue-economy industries. To understand our marine environments at regional and national scales, you need standardised foundational data and the tools to interpret that data.
As part of the Geoscience Australia-led Resourcing Australia’s Prosperity initiative, the Offshore Mapping Project produces national and regional bathymetric and seabed characterisation data products and tools.
A key output is the AusBathyTopo (ABT) series of bathymetry–topography compilation grids that ensure a consistent representation of elevation from mountain tops to the deepest ocean, using a process developed for Geoscience Australia by James Cook University. Source data are quality controlled, corrected to common datums, prioritised by reliability, and combined into the best achievable surfaces.
The ABT grids then are used to generate seabed morphology classifications by GA’s Semi-automated Morphological Mapping Tools (GA-SaMMT), a suite of ArcGIS Pro Python toolboxes designed to map, characterise and classify seabed features to enable efficient and repeatable geomorphic analysis at regional and national scales.
These datasets and tools are available to support the Future Made In Australia policy, ocean decision-makers, and researchers.