1. Australian Coastal Ecosystems
Delivering data to help manage Australia’s coastal ecosystems
Presentation by Jonathan Hodge, CSIRO

2. The coastal dilemma
Ecosystems
• Complex
• Diverse
• Variable

3. The coastal dilemma
Populations
• Complex
• Diverse
• Variable

4. The coastal dilemma
Management
• Complex
• Diverse
• Variable

5. Diversity of data
• Varying types:
• point-based, vector, raster, gridded, etc.
• Varying formats:
• often domain based (eg. biological vs
hydrodynamic models vs water quality)
• Varying availability and accessibility

6. ACEF themes

7. ACEF infrastructure
• Focus on re-use, re-usability and re-purposing
• Mix of data and portal solutions:
• Geospatial services (Geoserver)
• Metadata services (Geonetwork)
• Gridded data services (THREDDS)
• Modern web and content management tools
• ALA Biological Data Recording System
• CSIRO tools for time series data services
• Data Portal (Australian Ocean Data Network)

8. Focus areas
• Time-series data
• Video based data analysis
• Biological data
• Coastal “information”

9. Time-series data
• Traditionally:
• Custom connections to databases
• Custom visualisations
• Service based approach:
• Non-traditional databases
• Configuration-based
• High re-use
• But:
• Standards are not fully mature and not scalable

10. Time-series data
• Developing re-usable,
configurable time-series data
services
• Will result in extremely fast
visualisations of water quality
and other time series data
• Integrating into AODN
• In collaboration with SEQuITOR
and eReefs

11. Time-series data
• CSIRO’s SensorCloud system
• Ingests data from multiple sources giving
custodians flexibility in how they contribute
• Outputs in a single, consistent format
• Uses modern web technologies and data formats
• Highly efficient at handling very high frequency
data (eg. sub-second data)

12. Video data – beach morphology
• CoastalCOMS data is now available through a
custom data portal
• 17 full analysis locations around the country
(shoreline, wave, video)
• Many more video locations to come

13. Beach morphology
• Automated video processing
• Shoreline and wave analytics
• Raw video data

14. Beach morphology
• Online, accessible data:
• Shoreline (kml, reports, csv)
• Video time sequences (Timex)
• Raw data (video)
• Wave height (videos, csv,
reports, etc)

15. Biological data
• ALA’s Biological Data Recording System
• Web-based configurable survey system

16. National Marine Turtle Database
• Collating state-based
marine turtle datasets
• Initially focus on beach
nesting data
• Using ALA’s existing web
services to produce automated geospatial
products
• Data products will be delivered through ACEF’s
data portals

17. Seagrass
• Using the BDRS to capture
information on seagrass datasets
from researchers
• Integrating with ACEAS workshop
series (Australian Seagrass
Habitats)
• Will result in a national view of
seagrass datasets

18. Coastal Research Webportal
• Free system for researchers to
record information about
research projects
• Over 100 research projects
uploaded to the portal
• Total of 98 registered users
• Portal is receiving between
50 and 100 unique visitors
per week

19. OzCoasts
• OzCoasts receives over 20,000 unique visitors
and 150,000 page views per month
• Consists of some data but large amounts of
coastal “information”
• OzCoasts datasets now hosted by ACEF
• Building systems which allow experts to
contribute to and update OzCoasts content
• Spreading the maintenance and costs
www.ozcoasts.org.au

20. Implications for custodians
• Lowers the barrier to entry
• “Brokering” services which bridge the gap
from custodian to national infrastructure
• Diversity of capabilities to handle the
diversity of data
• Linking to existing communities, users and
systems
• “Easy” sales pitch

21. Australian Coastal Ecosystems Facility
Dr Andy Steven Jonathan Hodge
Director Deputy Director
Australian Coastal Ecosystems Australian Coastal Ecosystems
Facility Facility
t +61 7 3833 5570 t +61 7 3833 5515
e andy.steven@csiro.au e jonathan.hodge@csiro.au
http://acef.tern.org.au