About us
OzCoasts is a publicly accessible online database with a web-based interface that provides comprehensive information about Australia's coasts (including its estuaries and coastal waterways) to natural resource managers, marine scientists, planners, policy makers and the general public. This information and data helps to generate a better understanding of Australia's coastal environments. The content of OzCoasts represents the collaborative efforts of more than 100 coastal scientists from a wide range of government agencies and universities.
History
OzCoasts was originally called OzEstuaries, and was developed during the first National Land and Water Resources Audit (NLWRA, 2000) to incorporate the Australian Estuarine Database and estuarine datasets compiled at that time. The site was upgraded by Geoscience Australia in partnership with the Coastal CRC in 2003, to incorporate the conceptual models of ecosystem function and the coastal indicator and issue fact sheets, and subsequently in February 2006 with the addition of new datasets, images, research documents and 3D visualisations of coastal benthic environments. In May 2007 the content of the OzCoast module at the former Coastal CRC website was merged into OzEstuaries in the format of an Environmental Management module and the site underwent a name change to OzCoast and OzEstuaries. The site was re-released under the name OzCoasts in July 2008 as part of a second collaborative project with the NLWRA that saw the addition of a new NRM reporting module to the site. The OzCoasts website was formally launched on August 20, 2008 during the Coast to Coast conference in Darwin.
Site structure
The information on this site has been arranged in the following modules and each one can be accessed from the home page by selecting the link below the global navigation bar.
- Search Data
- Conceptual Models
- Coastal Indicators
- Habitat Mapping
- Environmental Management
- NRM Reporting
