Wetland Inventories and datasets

2008 Assessment

As part of a joint National Land & Water Resources Audit / DEWHA project a trawl of online wetland inventory type databases was carried out in 2008. This process identified 135 datasets - the majority of which had some form of metadata descriptions. Approximately half of the datasets had comprehensive information on wetland extent (though many of these relate to estuarine and coastal wetland types).

A copy of the database in Access format can be downloaded by right-clicking and saving the following file 2008 Wetland Inventory Data Trawl (1.8 MBytes)

Additional information and analysis of this dataset is available from Right-click and save-as here to download document in pdf format (13.7 MBytes)

Note: to be updated with new info - below is work in progress

2021 Assessment

A search for wetland on data.gov.au on 30 June 2021 returned 697 datasets https://data.gov.au/search?q=wetland while this was increased to 787 on 6th Sept 2021, and 840 on 16th May 2022

Using advanced web scraping techniques these records have been extracted and integrated into a single dB for analysis.

Some preliminary high-level findings on the data download from 30 June 2021 include:

  • Numerous duplicates are included in the dB
  • 554 unique titles exist
  • Within this 554 cohort, a total of 357 (or 57%) have download data available, with 272 (43.24%) not having any download material listed
  • A certain amount of redundancy occurs in relation to download formats (e.g. Shapefile and SHP, OGC:WFS and WFS etc)
  • To address reduncancy/inconsistency in nomenclature the format typology list can be reduced from 22 formats down to 16
  • Of the 554 unique title records:
    • 187 had one download format available
    • 71 had two
    • 30 had three
    • 47 had 4 or more formats
    • 487 (or 88%) have a URL link to a separate destination/landing page for the metadata record, and 67 records (12%) didn't have such a URL link
    • 9 records (< 2%) didn't have any Publisher information

Data searh engine results

2022 Status of linework and attribution