Case studies

Showing results 21 - 21 of 21
Case Study Digital Earth Australia: new technologies and partnerships to map Australia’s land

Norman Mueller, Geoscience Australia; Alex Held, CSIRO

Digital Earth Australia (DEA) is a platform for analysing all types of observations, but particularly those captured from satellites (GA 2020). Through a series of structures and tools that calibrate and standardise datasets for Australia’s conditions, petabytes of timeseries satellite data are made available for use by governments, researchers and industry. DEA uses open-source standards so that other countries can also apply the underlying technology to their own sustainable development challenges.

DEA supports Australia’s Earth observation community to achieve some of the broader goals as outlined within the Australian Earth observation community plan 2026 (AEOCCG 2016) and 2026 spatial industry transformation and growth agenda (2026 Agenda 2017, 2026 Agenda 2019), both of which reference the need for digital infrastructure to support industry growth, and note the importance of DEA as a key platform.

To date DEA has delivered several national-scale datasets that provide insight into Australia’s environment:

  • Water Observations from Space provides information on the extent of surface water observable daily by satellite, and also provides summary statistics on how often surface water is in our landscape over seasonal and annual periods, and in total since 1986 (Figure 86) (Mueller et al. 2016, GA 2017b).
  • Fractional Cover, developed by the Joint Remote Sensing Research Program (JRSP 2021), is an example of methods developed external to DEA being made operational at the national scale. Fractional Cover provides information on the distribution of green vegetation, brown vegetation and bare areas to understand changes in vegetation cover.
  • DEA Coastlines is a continental dataset that includes annual shorelines and rates of coastal change along the entire Australian coastline from 1988 to the present (Bishop-Taylor et al. 2019, Bishop-Taylor et al. 2021b, Bishop-Taylor et al. 2021a, GA 2021a) (see case study: Digital Earth Australia Coastlines – Monitoring coastal change in Australia using freely available satellite data, in the Rocky shoreline section in the Coasts chapter).
  • DEA Land Cover is a combination of the many DEA products, demonstrating the extents of various types of vegetation, water bodies, urban areas and cultivation across Australia (Lucas et al. 2019, Owers et al. 2021). DEA Land Cover brings the many themes of cover together in an annual dataset to show how different land features change and interact over time.

DEA supports land management by, for example:

  • enabling the agricultural industry to use satellite data to better target farm interventions such as fertiliser application
  • enabling water managers to monitor changes in the content of water bodies across Australia
  • providing information on the changes in vegetation cover associated with drought, cyclones and bushfires.

DEA’s products are available to view online in DEA Maps (GA 2021b). Research and development access is also available via DEA’s cloud-based ‘sandbox’ (GA 2021e), providing spatial professionals with the ability to develop algorithms on DEA’s products without the need to download petabytes of data. An associated training program has been made available to help new users become familiar with the sandbox, and a community help forum provides basic support.

Figure 86 Water Observations from Space filtered summary product for Australia, derived from water observations from 1987 to 2014
For more information, go toResources