DEA Coastal Ecosystems

Mapping coastal ecosystems is vital for understanding, managing, and protecting the diverse habitats that line our shorelines. These ecosystems—ranging from mangroves and saltmarshes to seagrass meadows and coral reefs—provide essential environmental services, including carbon storage, coastal protection, and habitat for marine biodiversity. From an economic standpoint, they sustain industries such as fisheries and tourism while reducing costs associated with coastal erosion and storm damage. Accurate and comprehensive mapping underpins management, restoration, and conservation efforts, allowing planners to identify priority areas, monitor ecological change, and assess the effectiveness of interventions.Achieving this at a continental scale, however, poses significant challenges. Traditional methods such as field surveys, aerial photography, and local-scale sampling are costly, labour-intensive, and constrained in spatial and temporal scope—limitations that are particularly relevant in a country as vast and remote as Australia. Earth Observation (EO) provides an efficient and consistent alternative, allowing large-scale, high-resolution, and repeatable mapping through the use of publicly available satellite imagery.The Digital Earth Australia (DEA) Coastal Ecosystems product suite (https://knowledge.dea.ga.gov.au/data/product/dea-coastal-ecosystems/) is the first national dataset to simultaneously map Australia’s mangrove, saltmarsh, intertidal, and intertidal seagrass ecosystems at 10 m resolution, using annual time-series of Sentinel-2 satellite imagery for consistent mapping at a continental scale. Applications- National Environmental Ecosystem Accounts- National and Regional State of the Environment reporting- A complementary mapping product to fill spatial and temporal gaps in higher resolution expert mapping (aerial and drone mapping, field surveys)- Future integration with other terrestrial and ocean data sets (e.g. Land Cover and Marine Tenure)- Coastal protection and Hazard modelling