About the Atlas
The Australian Natural Resources Atlas was developed by the National Land and Water Resources Audit to provide online access to information to support natural resource management. The Atlas is managed and maintained within the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts. The Atlas comprises of a number of tools and information on Australia's natural resources:
- Australia's Resources Online: Generate a report containing the latest available data on Australia's natural resources against the Natural Resource Management Monitoring and Evaluation framework . (See below).
- Map Maker: View and query the data from the Atlas or make a map of a region of interest
- Natural Resource Topics: View National, State and regional theme assessments of Australia's natural resources undertaken by the National Land and Water Resources Audit in 2000-2002, and find links to other sources of natural resource data.
The information in the Atlas was developed to involve a broad cross section of government and private sector groups interested in natural resource management issues. The Atlas can be accessed and used by managers and community groups to help in their planning and management activities. The information in the Atlas is organised by topic and geography. There are eleven topics to choose from in the Atlas:
- Agriculture: agricultural resources
- Coasts: coastal environments.
- Dryland salinity: causes and impacts of dryland salinity
- Irrigation: sustainable irrigation
- Land: land resources
- Natural resource economics: economics and natural resource management
- People: Australians and the management of natural resources
- Rangelands: monitoring the status and trends in the rangelands
- Soils: Australian soil properties
- Vegetation and biodiversity: biological resources
- Water: use, availability, quality and management
Each topic provides access to a set of information products. For example, the information products available for the water topic include water resources, water availability, water quality, water resource management and development, water use and allocation.
For many topics, the information is available at National, State/Territory and regional level. Examples of the regions include:
- River Basins
- Australian biogeographic regions (IBRA) version 5.1
- Statistical divisions/Sub-divisions
- Surface water basins and management areas and groundwater provinces and management units
For a full list of the reporting regions available for each topic see the Information Products Fact Sheet.
Access to data
The Australian Natural Resources Data Library is a sister application managed by the Bureau of Rural Sciences and provides a search facility to download data related to the Audit.
You can search on:
- title or keyword
- by defining an area of interest
The results will take you to the metadata report which will allow you to download the available data.
Australia's Resources Online
Objective
Australia’s Resources Online (ARO) is a dynamic application to report on the condition and trend of the land, water and biological resources in Australia against the natural resource management monitoring and evaluation framework (NRM M&EF) .
Technology
The application uses interoperable web services to access data directly from the custodian. Agreed theme-based standard schemas allow agencies to deliver web services that can be accessed and collated by the ARO application.
OpenGeospatial Consortium (OGC) standards for web map services and web feature services are utilised to allow for interoperability with other applications and users.
Project Management
ARO is a cooperative project being undertaken by the National Land and Water Resources Audit (NLWRA) and the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (DEW) .
Newsletter
What's new
New 'Land Use of Australia, Version 3' data showing irrigation, agriculture and landuse for the years 1992, 1993, 1996, 1998, 2000 and 2001 have been added to the Map Maker.
More on land use data....
Australian Water Resources 2005 data has been added to the Map Maker.
More on the water data...
Key
Links to an another web site
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