Australia’s Environment in 2018

National-scale, comprehensive information on the condition, change and trajectory of our environment.

The Australia’s Environment report aims to make spatial information on environmental conditions more accessible and easily interpreted at different levels of detail.  Information can be accessed in different ways:

  • Fact Sheet   : a 4-page summary in dot points and figures.
  • Briefing Material  : slides used in the briefing providing a longer, visual summary.
  • Article in The Conversation: a short summary and interpretation in accessible language.
  • Australia’s Environment Explorer: a web atlas that allows you to visualise and investigate environmental changes by region, location or land cover type.

 

Acknowledgments

Australia’s environment is produced in collaboration with

  • National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)
  • Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS)
  • Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN)
  • Atlas of Living Australia (ALA)
  • Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)
  • Bureau of Meteorology (BoM)
  • Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)
  • Geoscience Australia (GA)
  • FlowMatters Pty Ltd
  • TerraBytes Pty Ltd

Seed funding was provided by the Australian Research Council and the Bureau of Meteorology. Data from additional sources is gratefully acknowledged.

Previous reports

 

Australia’s Environment Explorer

Spatial environmental data and time series can be challenging to work with. The Explorer aims to provide direct access to data summaries, as maps, accounts and charts. Data can be examined by point location, region and land cover type, compared to preceding years, or downloaded for further analysis.

The explorer currently offers data on 13 indicators in 6 themes. Lack of national-scale observations means that information is not available for several important aspects of our environment, such as biodiversity and soil health.

New to the site? You may wish to take a guided tour of the Explorer to get you started.

 

Data Description 

You can find a brief description of the origin of each data layer by clicking the information icon behind the indicator title in the map legend or chart box.

Most of the data are produced by our OzWALD (Australian Water and Landscape Dynamics) model-data fusion system, which integrates a wide range of satellite and ground observations through the use of a computer model of Australia’s environment. A full description of the system is forthcoming, but details are gladly provided on request. Data not derived from the OzWALD model-data fusion system include the following:

  • Land use: ABARES: Catchment Scale Land Use of Australia – Update September 2017, in, ABARES, Canberra, 2017. (link to reference)
  • Fire intensity and occurrence: Geoscience Australia, 2014. Sentinel Hotspots Product Description Document V1.2, code D2014-145826, Geocat Reference 70869 (link to reference)
  • Fire carbon emissions: Kaiser, J.W., Heil, A., Andreae, M.O., Benedetti, A., Chubarova, N., Jones, L., Morcrette, J.J., Razinger, M., Schultz, M.G., Suttie, M., & van der Werf, G.R., 2012. Biomass burning emissions estimated with a global fire assimilation system based on observed fire radiative power. Biogeosciences, 9, 527-554 (link to reference)

If you have any questions about the methods and the data on our website, please do not hesitate to ask us about it.

 

Downloading data

Before downloading any data please note our general disclaimer.

Regional Summary Data

You can download Regional Summary Data directly via the ‘Get the data‘ link below the data chart on the website. If you wish to download all available data at once, you can find all data in csv format here.

Gridded data

All gridded data can be accessed and downloaded via NCI’s THREDDS service in NetCDF4 format. If you are familiar with these then you can directly access our data catalogue. You can find annual files with data at the highest temporal and spatial time step available. To access the gridded annual maps you can also follow the Direct Download Links below. If you are not familiar with the NCI THREDDS you can find a good description here. Various software packages have native or external utilities to read NetCDF format, including QGIS, ArcGIS (instructions here), Matlab, Python, and ENVI/IDL. You can find a partial (if somewhat dated) list of processing and viewing software here.

Direct Links

Note: each file contains multiple layers; one for each year in the record. These can be accessed by year by using OpenDAP protocols (see above). Files containing all years can also be downloaded directly in full, but note that files are usually larger than 500 MB.

For more information on the methods used, see the Data Description above.

 

Disclaimer

The material provided through this website is experimental and derived through active research. The Australian National University does not have a legislated role in providing authoritative information. All information is made available on the understanding that it does not constitute professional advice. Before relying on the material in any important matter, users should carefully evaluate its accuracy, currency, completeness and relevance for their purposes, and should obtain any appropriate professional advice relevant to their particular circumstances. Links to other websites do not constitute an endorsement of material at those sites, or any associated organisation, product or service.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

Below are some questions that have been asked. If you cannot find the answer you are looking for, please contact us (our contact details are at the top right) and we will do our best to help.

Can I use the data?

Absolutely! We are delighted for you to use the data in any way you like. Do take note of our general disclaimer before using any of the data. In terms of licensing, all data is provided under Creative Commons license (CC BY 3.0 AU – you can find details here). Essentially, we only ask that you identify the source of the data in your communication. Where we use third-party data, those, too, were made available under a Creative Commons license and so the same applies there (see ‘How should I refer to the data?’ below). Of course, we would very much like to hear your experience in using the website and data, so we can improve their usefulness as much as possible!

How should I refer to the data?

If you are using downloaded regional summary data or visual material from the website, we suggest you cite them using the following details:

Van Dijk, Albert. I.J.M., Summers, David (2016) Australia’s Environment Explorer, The Australian National University (http://www.ausenv.online) DOI: 10.4225/41/5934faf27397b

If you are downloading the gridded data, then you can find citation information in the metadata of each data file. For technical references to the methods used, see the Data Description.

The data units shown in the pie chart seem wrong?

These units result when multiplying the units of the primary gridded data with the area covered. If the primary data were expressed as mass per unit area or water depth, the result will be total mass (e.g., tonnes Carbon, tC) or water volume (ML), respectively. The result can be somewhat unusual in other cases. For example, if the units of the primary data were fraction (or percentage) of the area, the result will be in square kilometres; if they were events per unit area, the result will be an estimated total number – but not necessarily a round number (see below).

Why are the regional fire occurrence numbers in the charts not round numbers?

The gridded fire occurrence data provide the number of fires per 2.5 km resolution grid cell, which is the approximate accuracy with which they can be located. For the regional summaries, these data are transformed to 250 m resolution so they can be combined with land cover and region mapping. This is done by assigning each cell 1/100th of the number of cells in the original data. As a result, the estimated number of fires is usually not a round number.

Where there really no fires in 2000 and 2001?

There were. The GA Sentinel Hotspots Mapping system on which fire occurrences are based came into operation in 2002. Therefore there are no data for 2000 and 2001. As the system came into operation during 2002, data for that year should also be considered incomplete.

Why is the number given for the total area of Australia not always the same?

The area of Australia listed in the chart box represents the total area of all regions combined and depends on the region boundary view you have chosen. For example, it may show the total area of all Ramsar Wetlands or National Parks, or in River Region view, the combined area of all mainland catchment. Even between types of regions that cover the entire continent numbers can vary, for example depending on whether certain water bodies were included or not.