Time and Tide: Mapping Australia's dynamic coastal zone
Channel: GeoscienceAustralia
Date: 2021-06-04

Speaker:  Dr Robbi Bishop-Taylor

Summary:
Australia has a vast and highly dynamic coastline of over 30,000 kilometres with many unique environments: sandy beaches, rocky cliffs, muddy tidal flats, and mangroves. Until recently, this scale and complexity has meant that many of Australia’s coastal environments have been poorly and inconsistently mapped, particularly in dynamic or remote regions where accurate survey data can be extremely challenging and costly to obtain. In recent years, however, satellites orbiting our planet have provided a new and powerful source of information about Australia’s coast and how it has changed over recent decades. Digital Earth Australia is a government platform that prepares these vast volumes of satellite data and makes it available to governments and industry for easy use. This talk will showcase how new and innovative analysis techniques can be applied to petabytes of DEA satellite data to better understand and monitor Australia’s vast coastal zone from space: from using the rise and fall of the tide to map the 3D shape of Australia’s coast, to track how our coastline has shifted and changed over the past three decades in unprecedented scale and detail. We will demonstrate how these freely available coastal products and tools developed by Digital Earth Australia can be used by scientists, managers, policymakers and the general public to provide new information to help maintain and protect Australia’s iconic shores for future generations.

About the Speaker: 
Dr Robbi Bishop-Taylor is a Coastal Earth Observation Scientist from the Digital Earth Australia Program at Geoscience Australia. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Geospatial Science for research mapping multidecadal surface water dynamics using satellite imagery. At Geoscience Australia, Robbi works as part of an interdisciplinary team responsible for developing the first continent-wide maps of Australia’s vast intertidal zone, and the recently released Digital Earth Australia Coastlines dataset that maps Australia’s dynamic coastline using three decades of satellite imagery.