Integrated Marine and Coastal Regionalisation of Australia (IMCRA) v4.0 - Meso-scale Bioregions

﻿ Abstract The Integrated Marine and Coastal Regionalisation of Australia (IMCRA v4.0) is a spatial framework for classifying Australia’s marine environment into bioregions that make sense ecologically and are at a scale useful for regional planning. This will be a framework for subsequent finer levels of planning and management. IMCRA v.4.0 is the product of the combination of the Interim Marine and Coastal Regionalisation of Australia (IMCRA v3.3), which provided a marine regionalisation of inshore waters, with the National Marine Bioregionalisation (NMB) for off-shelf waters. In combining the two national scale marine regionalisations, IMCRA v4.0 covers Australia’s waters from the coast to the edge of the Exclusive Economic Zone excluding Antarctica and Heard and Macdonald Islands. Regionalisations provide spatial frameworks that have applications for many aspects of natural resource management. They are based on collated data and inferred patterns across a variety of spatial scales and are an accepted tool to assist in the description of ecosystem boundaries for planning and management in the natural environment. Marine regionalisations help managers to understand complex ecosystems and their specific management needs. As a tool for organising spatial information, regionalisations are important for conservation, education, science, environmental inventories, delineation of biophysical distributions and the development of management policies and organisation of management activities. The IMCRA v4.0 is used as the national and regional framework for Australia’s National Representative System of Marine Protected Areas (NRSMPA). Other applications include * decision-making (e.g. in assessing applications for permits); * identifying areas that have particular values for conservation or use (e.g. Great Barrier Reef Marine Park); * finer-scale habitat mapping (e.g. Northwest Shelf Joint Environmental Study in 2002 and Great Barrier Reef Marine Park); and * fine scale bioregional assessments as part of marine protected area planning. There are 60 meso-scale regions on the continental shelf, defined using biological and physical information and geographic distance along the coast. Detailed descriptions of the mesoscale regions can be found in the report for IMCRA v3.3 (IMCRA Technical Group, 1998). For more information see the [guide to the Integrated Marine and Coastal Regionalisation of Australia – version 4.0 June 2006 (IMCRA v4.0)] Currency Date modified: June 2006 Modification frequency: None Data extent Spatial extent North: -8.88° South: -58.45° East: 170.37° West: 109.23° Temporal extent From June 2006 to Present Source information This dataset is provided by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water * [Map Server] * [Metadata] * [Public listing] Lineage statement IMCRA v4.0 mesoscale bioregions are based on IMCRA v3.3 with updates to the coastline, shelf break, a small boundary change in WA, and error corrections in NSW. For IMCRA v3.3 two main approaches were used in integrating existing data received from State and Northern Territory marine conservation agencies: 1. Available regionalisation boundaries and descriptions were interpreted/integrated and transferred onto paper maps, and then these boundaries were digitised; and 2. Where local and sub-regional scale GIS datasets were available, these data/regions were aggregated to derive coarser meso-scale map unit boundaries using a combination of paper-based maps and GIS. For IMCRA v4.0 the coastline was replaced with the national 100k coastline to provide greater consistency. The Australian EEZ limit was sourced from AMB v2. Data dictionary All layers ──────────────┬────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Attribute name│Description ──────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── MESO_NAME │Name given to each meso-scale bioregion ──────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── MESO_NUM │Number given to each meso-scale bioregion used as shorthand reference ──────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── MESO_ABBR │Abbreviation of meso-scale bioregion name ──────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── WATER_TYPE │Tropical, sub-tropical, warm temperate, cold temperate and the transitional zones between them ──────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── AREA_KM2 │Approximate area in square kilometres ──────────────┴────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Contact Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, [GeoSpatial@dcceew.gov.au]