Standard Presentation Australian Marine Sciences Association Annual Meeting 2023

Foundational Datasets in Intertidal Regions: Developments and Improvements to Coastal Datasets in Digital Earth Australia (#254)

Claire Phillips 1 , Robbi Bishop-Taylor 1 , Stephen Sagar 1 , Nicholas Murray 2 , Mitchell Lyons 3 , Alejandro Navarro 2 , Vanessa Newey 1
  1. Geoscience Australia, Symonston, ACT, Australia
  2. James Cook University, Townsville
  3. University of NSW, Sydney

The Digital Earth Australia (DEA) collection includes a suite of national Landsat-derived coastal data products. Recent upgrades to our Landsat and Sentinel-2 analysis-ready data collections have enabled the development of new and improved derived data products for intertidal regions.

Major improvements to our national intertidal suite of products include:

  • the addition of the Sentinel-2 sensor
  • pixel-based calculations to improve spatial resolution
  • epoch-based outputs
  • updated intertidal elevation and extents models
  • updated high and low tide composites
  • new layers modelling intertidal hydroperiod, sensor-offset and more
  • the use of a new global tide model
  • a toolkit enabling tailored analyses

Furthermore, a new coastal habitat mapping program will leverage existing machine learning algorithms (Murray et al., 2022) to develop continental extent maps of Australian coastal habitats, including tidal flats, seagrass, saltmarsh and mangroves. A new, extensive, Australia-wide training data set of these same ecosystem types has been generated that is enabling existing and new machine learning mapping approaches in the coastal and intertidal zone. Updated national mangrove extents will be used to upgrade the existing DEA Mangroves product, from which annual mangrove canopy cover change mapping is enabled.

  1. Murray et al., Science 376, 744-749 (2022)