Australia's Land Borders is a product within the Foundation Spatial Data Framework (FSDF) suite of datasets. It is endorsed by the ANZLIC – the Spatial Information Council and the Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping (ICSM) as the nationally consistent representation of the land borders as published by the Australian states and territories. It is topologically correct in relation to published jurisdictional land borders and the Geocoded National Address File (G-NAF).
The purpose of this product is to provide:
- a building block which enables development of other national datasets;
- integration with other geospatial frameworks in support of data analysis; and
- visualisation of these borders as cartographic depiction on a map.
Although this service depicts land borders, it is not nor does it purport to be a legal definition of these borders. Therefore it cannot and must not be used for those use-cases pertaining to legal context.
In addition to Land Border polylines, the product incorporates a number of well-known survey-monumented corners which have historical and cultural significance associated with the place name. The corner markers have been created at the intersections of the relevant land borders. FSDF placenames was used as the name and spelling source of the corner markers.
Corner Markers in Australia define the intersections of the following land borders:
Corner name | Land borders involved |
Surveyor Generals Corner | WA, NT, SA |
Surveyor Generals Corner | WA, NT |
Poeppel Corner | NT, SA, QLD |
Haddon Corner | QLD, SA |
Cameron Corner | QLD, SA, NSW |
MacCabe Corner | NSW, VIC |
This feature layer is a sub-layer of the Land Borders service.
Date modified: 10 November 2021
Modification frequency: None
North: -26.00°
South: -34.02°
East: 141.00°
West: 129.00°
Catalog entry: Australia's Land Borders
The Land Borders dataset is created using a range of source data including:
- Australian Capital Territory data was sourced from the ACT Government GeoHub – ‘ACT Boundary’. No changes have been made to the polylines or vertices of the source data.
- In the absence of any custodian published border for Jervis Bay – New South Wales, a border has been constructed from the boundary of the NSW cadastre supplied by NSW Spatial Services. Geoscience Australia’s GEODATA TOPO 250K data was considered as an alternative, however, that border terminated short of the coastline as it stops at the shoreline of the major water bodies. Therefore, a decision was made to use the NSW and OT supplied cadastre to create a new representation of the Jervis Bay border that continued to the coastline (MHWM), in place of the TOPO 250K data.
- In the absence of publicly available data from New South Wales, the land borders for New South Wales have been constructed using the data of adjoining states Queensland, South Australia, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory. This approach is agreeable to New South Wales Government for this interim product.
- In the absence of publicly available data from the Northern Territory the land borders for the Northern Territory have been constructed using the data of adjoining states Western Australia, Queensland and South Australia. This approach is agreeable to Northern Territory Government for this interim product.
- Queensland state border and coastline data have been download from the Queensland Spatial, Catalogue – QSpatial.
- Publicly available data for the state borders of South Australia was downloaded from data.gov.au and is ‘SA State Boundary - PSMA Administrative Boundaries’. Downloaded as a file geodatabase in GDA2020.
- Victorian state border data has been downloaded from the Victorian state Government Spatial Datamart, it is titled ‘FR_FRAMEWORK_AREA_LINE’. The Victorian state border data was used for the NSW/VIC section of border due to the absence of any publicly available data from New South Wales for this section of the border.
- Western Australian state border data was downloaded from the WA Government as publicly available. The Western Australia state border data has been used for the WA/NT section of the border due to the absence of publicly available data from Northern Territory for this section of the border. Selecting the SA data for the WA/SA border would introduce mismatches with the WA cadastre. It would also not improve the SA relationship with the SA cadastre. Using the WA data for the WA/SA section of the border aligns each state with its own cadastre without causing overlaps.
At the southwest end of the NT/SA/WA border the South Australian data for the border was edited by moving the end vertex ~1.7m to correctly create the intersection of the 3 states (SA/WA/NT).
At the southeast end of the NT/QLD/SA border the South Australian data for the border was edited by moving the end vertex ~0.4m to correctly create the intersection of the 3 states (NT/SA/QLD).
Queensland data was used for the NT/QLD border and the QLD/NSW border due to the absence of publicly available data from the Northern Territory for these section of the border. Data published by Queensland also included a border sections running westwards along the southern Northern Territory border and southwards along the western New South Wales border. These two sections were excluded from the product as they are not within the state of Queensland. Queensland data was also used in the entirety for the SA/QLD segment of the land borders. Although the maximum overlap between SA and QLD state border data was less than ~5m (and varied along the border), the Queensland data closely matched its own cadastre and that of South Australia. The South Australian data overlapped the Queensland data, it also did not match the South Australian cadastre. Therefore, a decision to use the Queensland data for the QLD/SA section of the border ensured the best possible topological consistency with the published cadastre of each state.
The South Australian/Victorian state border, north-south, were generally very similar with some minor deviations from each other from less than 1m to ~60m (there is one instance of deviation of 170m). The section of border that follows the Murray River is matched, for the most part by both states. Over three quarters of the border running along the river is matched with both states. There is a mismatch between the states in the last quarter of the border along the river, the northern section, however, both states still have the border running inside, or along, the river polygon (Surface hydrology), the Victorian data was chosen for this section purely for consistency as the Victorian data was used for the preceding arcs.
Overall, the Victorian data was selected for use as the South Australia/Victoria land border. After taking the existing cadastre and GNAF points into account and it did not introduce extra errors into the relationship between the land borders and the cadastre of either state. In parts, it improved the relationship between the South Australian cadastre and the SA/VIC state border.
This interim product will be updated when all states and territories have published agreed, authoritative representations of their land borders. This product will also be updated to include land mass polygons at time when the Coastline Capture Program is complete. This dataset is GDA 2020 compliant - transformed into GDA2020 from it's original source datum. Reference System Code 2020.00.
Attribute name | Description |
NAME | Official name of the corner marker |
COMMENT | Legal disclaimer for the positional data |
DATE_CREATED | Date on which the positional data point was created in the data set |
FEATURE_TYPE | All features in this data set are labelled "CORNER_MARKER" |
STATES | Corner markers divide at least two states and/or territories |
Geoscience Australia, [email protected]
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Abstract
The Historical Bushfire Boundaries Dataset (version 2) represents the aggregation of jurisdictional supplied burnt areas polygons that date from the early 1900s through to 2023 (excluding the Northern Territory). The burnt areas represent curated jurisdictional owned polygons of bushfires and prescribed (planned) burns.
This dataset was produced under Work Stream 1C - Activity 3 of the National Bushfire Intelligence Capability (NBIC) , a collaborative partnership between:
- Australian Climate Service
- CSIRO (NBIC)
- Geoscience Australia
- Emergency Management Spatial Information Network (EMSINA)
Under
agreement this Project (Activity 3) will release a nationally consistent,
harmonised and standardised historical bushfire boundary dataset derived from
the authoritative state and territory agencies in both 2023 (this dataset) and
again in November 2024.
The information released within this dataset is reflective of the data supplied
by participating authoritative agencies. It may, or may not, represent all fire
history within that jurisdiction.
Geoscience Australia's role within this project is to:
- negotiate access to the state/territory historic bushfire boundary datasets
- aggregate, harmonise and standardise the jurisdictional data against the Australasian Fire Authorities Council (AFAC) National Bushfire Boundary Standards
- host the completed spatial product(s)
- arrange for the 'Historical Bushfire Boundaries' spatial dataset to be accessible through Geoscience Australia’s external data catalogues and through the new Digital Atlas of Australia platform
- ensure stakeholders have access to regular project updates.
To harmonsise and standardise this dataset Geoscience Australia have utilised the AFAC endorsed data dictionary for fire history. This data dictionary and the definitions provided allowed Geoscience Australia to map common attributes from both sources. Unfortunately, not all attributes mapped across like-for-like. This resulted in Geoscience Australia either modifying or joining some of the jurisdictional attributes to fit or Geoscience Australia added them during the processing stage.
Currency
Date modified: November 2023
Next modification date: November 2024
Data extent
Spatial extent
North:
-9°
South: -44°
East: 154°
West: 112°
Temporal extent
3 March 2023 to November 2023
Source information
Catalog entry: Bushfire Boundaries – Historical
Lineage statement
Date created: 3 March 2023
This dataset extends upon the first version of this dataset to be built and released under the Australia Research Data Commons Project in early 2023.
This dataset (version 2) represents an updated aggregation of each jurisdiction (except the Northern Territory) fire history data to include information from the 2022-23 bushfire season.
Agencies that have provided data include:
- Australian Capital Territory Parks and Conservation
- New South Wales Parks and Wildlife Service
- Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service
- South Australia Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources
- Tasmania Department of Natural Resources and Environment
- Victorian Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning
- Western Australia Department of Fire and Emergency Services
The Northern Territory Government is progressing in the development of their Bushfire Boundary Capabilities. Work is underway with the relevant agencies to incorporate Northern Territory Government approved Historical Bushfire Boundary data in the future.
Product standardisation:
The data provided by each jurisdiction is standardised and harmonised. This process maps the existing state/territory attributes to the National Data Schema that was agreed to and endorsed by the participating state agencies and the Australian Fire and Emergency Services Authorities Council.
The Digital Atlas of Australia data team published an optimised Bushfire Boundaries Historic dataset designed to perform efficiently in either a desktop application or a web service.
This process utilised FME to reduce the processing time on millions of vertices within the complex dataset:
- Dataset projected to epsg:4326 to align with the near real time services hosted on the Digital Atlas of Australia
- Removes island or donut polygons within a fire extent, therefore a fire extent is shown with an outline and no internal parts
- Create separate polygon chunks based on 10000 vertices while maintaining the same attributes for each chunk of the identified fire, if a fire consists of multiple polygons each polygon is counted separately within the identified fire
As a result the Bushfire Boundaries Historic dataset hosted in the Digital Atlas of Australia has more records than the original dataset.
Data dictionary
All layers
Attribute name |
Description |
fire_id |
ID attached to fire (e.g. incident ID, Event ID, Burn ID). |
fire_name |
Incident name. If available. |
fire_type |
Binary variable to describe whether a fire was a bushfire or prescribed burn. |
ignition_date |
The date of the ignition of a fire event. Date and time are local time zone from the State where the fire is located and stored as a string. |
capt_date |
The date of the incident boundary was captured or updated. Date and time are local time zone from the Jurisdiction where the fire is located and stored as a string. |
capt_method |
Categorical variable to describe the source of data used for defining the spatial extent of the fire. |
area_ha |
Burnt area in Hectares. Currently calculated field so that all areas calculations are done in the same map projection. Jurisdiction supply area in appropriate projection to match state incident reporting system. |
perim_km |
Burnt perimeter in Kilometres. Calculated field so that all areas calculations are done in the same map projection. Jurisdiction preference is that supplied perimeter calculations are used for consistency with jurisdictional reporting. |
state |
State custodian of the data. NOTE: Currently some states use and have in their feeds cross border data |
agency |
Agency that is responsible for the incident |
date_retrieved |
The date and time that Geoscience Australia retrieved this data from the jurisdictions, stored as UTC. Please note when viewed in ArcGIS Online, the date is converted from UTC to your local time. |
Fire Type definitions
Data Source Category |
Description |
Bushfire |
Unplanned vegetation fire. A generic term which includes grass fires, forest fires and scrub fires both with and without a suppression objective. Also known as wildfire, accident, arson, lightning. |
Prescribed Burn |
The controlled application of fire under specified environmental conditions to a predetermined area and at the time, intensity, and rate of spread required to attain planned resource management objectives. Also known as planned burning, fuel reduction, traditional owner, ecological, hazard reduction |
Unknown |
Fire type is undetermined. |
Ignition Cause definitions
Data Source Category |
Description |
Accidental |
Fires that are not the result of a deliberate (intentional) act. |
Natural |
Fires that ignite without human intervention. |
Incendiary |
Fires result from deliberate acts, intentional actions, or circumstances for the fire to occur in areas where it should not have occurred. |
Undetermined |
Fires that have not yet been investigated, under investigation or fires that have been investigated and the cause is not proven to an acceptable level of certainty. |
Capture Method definitions
Data Source Category |
Description |
Aerial photography |
Derived from Aerial photography including manual interpretation as well as partially automated and fully automated methods. |
Linescanner |
Mapped against airborne sensor systems. |
Ground intelligence |
Mud map from ground observation. |
Ground intelligence GPS |
Fire boundary derived from ground (e.g. GPS tracker, Avenza). |
Air intelligence |
Mud map from air observation. |
Air intelligence |
GPS Fire boundary derived from air (e.g. helicopter, spotter). |
Himawari |
Derived from geostationary satellite Himawari and includes manual interpretation as well as partially automated and fully automated methods (spatial accuracy ± 2 kilometres). |
NOAA AVHRR |
Derived from Low Resolution - NOAA AVHRR satellite including manual interpretation, partially automated and fully automated methods (spatial accuracy ± 1 kilometres). |
MODIS |
Derived from Low Resolution - MODIS satellite imagery including manual interpretation as well as partially automated and fully automated methods (spatial accuracy ± 250 metres). |
VIIRS |
Derived from Low Resolution - VIIRS satellite imagery including manual interpretation as well as partially automated and fully automated methods (spatial accuracy ± 375 metres). |
Landsat |
Derived from Medium Resolution - Landsat satellite imagery including manual interpretation as well as partially automated and fully automated methods (spatial accuracy ± 30 metres). |
Sentinel |
Derived from Medium Resolution - Sentinel satellite imagery including manual interpretation as well as partially automated and fully automated methods (spatial accuracy ± 10 - 20 metres). |
Multiple |
Derived from multiple sources e.g. combination of ground intel and linescanner. For detailed information contact agency or state responsible. |
Unknown |
Data Source is unknown. |
Contact
Geoscience Australia, [email protected]