1. Australian Coastal Ecosystem Facility:
Delivering data to help manage Australia’s
coastal ecosystems
Andy Steven, CSIRO
ACEF Facility Director

2. Our Coastal Zone
Source: C.Roelfsema, DERM and Google Images

3. ACEF Aims
Goal:
Provide national and enduring access to coastal data of national
importance
Objectives
1. Establish a coastal community of practice to bring together
researcher managers, industry and the community to
identify key coastal datasets, improve technologies and
identify further funding opportunities.
2. Identify key national datasets that need to be collected, and
fund strategic research that address key gaps in these
datasets.
3. Enable improved digital access to quality-assured coastal
observational data and methods for analysis & visualization.

4. ACEF themes

5. ACEF collaborations
• Queensland, New South Wales, Victorian and
other state Governments
• Geoscience Australia
• Healthy Waterways
• QCIF
• AODN
• SEWPaC (ERIN)
• CSIRO
• Universities and many other researchers

6. ACEF Communities of Practice:
National Estuaries Network
• Building on existing community of practice
• ACEF will continue to support NEN
• Prime opportunity to communicate to coastal
experts around the country
• Helping to clarify the message around TERN
and other national investments

7. NCRIS Collaborations
Supersites
• Assisting in data visualisation
• Linking data to ACEF portal
Australian National Data Service
• Integrated Coastal data in SEQuITOR project
Integrated MarineObservation System
• Using AODN portal code
• ACEF Discoverable through AODN
Atlas of Living Australia
• Biological Data Recording System used for
seagrass and turtles

8. ACEF Portal

9. Coastal Research
• Over 100 research projects
uploaded to the portal
• Total of 98 registered users
• Portal is receiving between
50 and 100 unique visitors
per week

10. Coastal Information- Enhancing OzCoasts
Working with Geoscience Australia to enhance OzCoasts
• OzCoasts datasets (estuaries and geomorphic habitats) now
hosted by ACEF
• ACEF’s Drupal system used to allow researchers to edit coastal
indicators and conceptual diagrams pages online
• More datasets and mapping upgrades to come

11. ACEF Data Portal infrastructure
• Mix of data and portal solutions:
• Geoserver, GeoNetwork, THREDDS Data Server
• AODN Portal
• ALA Biological Data Recording System
• Virtual machines based at CSIRO
and QCIF
• Range of data types
• Discrete, time series, maps, images
• Real-time data

12. Seagrass
• Using the ALA system to capture
seagrass data from researchers
• Integrating with ACEAS workshop
series (Australian Seagrass
Habitats)
• Test system released and first
dataset uploaded.
• Will result in a national view of
seagrass datasets

13. Coastal satellite imagery
• New satellite imagery
being made available
through ACEF
• Hi-res WorldView-2 (50cm)
• Raw data can be made
available free of charge to
project partners
• 10m imagery to be made
fully available

14. 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

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

16. National Marine Turtle Database
• Collating state-based
marine turtle datasets
• Initially focusing on beach
nesting data
• Utilising the ALA’s ‘Biological
Data Recording System’ – BDRS
• Data products delivered through
ACEF’s geospatial servers

17. Water quality times series data
• Ongoing discussions with
Queensland, New South Wales
and Victorian Governments
• Draft data received from
Queensland and New South Wales
• Data to be made accessible using
time-series data services and
advanced graphing tools
• Developing re-usable, configurable
time-series data services
• Will result in extremely fast
visualisations of water quality and
other time series data

18. What next?

19. Australian Coastal Ecosystems Facility
Our Resilient Coastal Australia
Dr Andy Steven Jonathan Hodge
Director Deputy Director
Australian Coastal Ecosystems Facility Australian Coastal Ecosystems Facility
t +61 7 3833 5570 t +61 7 3833 5515
e andy.steven@csiro.au e jonathan.hodge@csiro.au