This dataset is indicative of the surface water upstream catchment areas of Australia's internationally significant wetlands (listed under the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands). These data are used as reporting layer in the Protected Matters Search Tool and assists in assessing proposed activities (EPBC referrals) for potential downstream impacts against Ramsar wetlands.

National dataset of Australia's Ramsar Wetlands. The Convention on Wetlands of International Importance (the Ramsar Convention) was signed in Ramsar, Iran on 2 February 1971. The Ramsar Convention aims to halt the worldwide loss of wetlands and to conserve, through wise use and management, those that remain. The Convention encourages member countries to nominate sites containing representative, rare or unique wetlands, or that are important for conserving biological diversity, to the List of Wetlands of International Importance (Ramsar sites). Australia was one of the first countries to become a Contracting Party to the Convention and designated the world's first Ramsar site, Cobourg Peninsula, in 1974. This project was initiated by the Wetlands Section of the Australian Government Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. Spatial data was sourced from the relevant State and Territory agencies and compiled into a single national coverage.

Background Wetlands provide a wide range of ecosystem services including improving water quality, carbon sequestration, as well as providing habitat for fish, amphibians, reptiles and birds. Managing wetlands in Australia is challenging due to competing pressures for water availability and highly variable climatic settings. The Wetlands Insight Tool (Ramsar Wetlands) has been developed to provide catchment managers, environmental water holders, andwetlands scientists a consistent historical baseline of wetlands dynamics from 1987 onwards. The Wetlands Insight Tool (Ramsar Wetlands) is available online through the DEA Mapswebsite. The Ramsar Wetlands of Australia Dataset is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia Licence. We created individual wetland polygons from the multipart Ramsar polygons in the dataset. The 6 Australian Ramsar Sites in external territories are excluded as they are outside of Australia’s satellite data footprint. What this product offers The Wetlands Insight Tool (Ramsar Wetlands) summarises how the amount of water, green vegetation, dry vegetation and bare soil varies over time within eachwetland boundary.It provides the user with the ability to compare how the wetland is behaving now with how it has behaved in the past. This allows users to identify how changes in water availability have affected the wetland.It achieves this bypresentinga combined view of Water Observations from Space (DEA Water Observations), Tasseled Cap Wetness (DEA Wetness Percentiles) and Fractional Cover (DEA Fractional Cover) measurements from the Landsat series of satellites, summarised as a stacked line plot to show how that wetlandhas changed over time.

The Ramsar Sites dataset defines the official boundaries of current and proposed Western Australia Ramsar wetlands listed as Wetlands of International Importance, under the Ramsar Convention. This dataset is polygon based. The attributes provided the official Ramsar site name, Ramsar site number (i.e. Ref Code), Ramsar site status (i.e. “Existing” or “DRAFT Proposed Area”) as well as the area in hectares of the entire site and individual components. This is a publicly available dataset.

This is a polygon coverage representing the Western Australian wetlands cited in the "A Directory of Important Wetlands in Australia" Third Edition (EA, 2001), plus various additions for wetlands listed after 2001. The full dataset is collated by the Australian Government Department of the Environment from various datasets supplied by the relevant State agencies. A subset of the WA Important Wetlands are listed as RAMSAR wetlands.

This data set shows designated and actual irrigation areas in Australia compiled by the National Land Use Mapping Project of the National Land and Water Resources Audit to assist in the identification of irrigation areas in Australia. Additional data custodians include Agriculture WA, Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines, Murray-Darling Basin Commission, New South Wales Department of Land and Water Conservation and Tasmanian Department of Primary Industries, Water and Environment Designated irrigation areas indicate areas with administratively defined boundaries which have associated rights and obligations pertaining to use of water for irrigation. The precise meaning of the term designated irrigation area varies from region to region. aActual irrigation areasa indicate areas with observationally defined boundaries within which irrigation is practised. The boundaries have been supplied by various agencies and cover the more important irrigation areas in Australia. Users of this data set should be aware that there are irrigated areas outside the designated and actual areas shown and that there are non-irrigated areas inside them. This is particularly true of Tasmania and the Murray-Darling Basin.The data set is available in both vector and raster formats. The raster data set can be used as a companion to the 1996/97 Land Use of Australia data set which is also in raster format. Both data sets have the same coordinate system, boundary coordinates and cell size so that they can easily be overlaid. Users may find, however, that some cells are classified as irrigated by the Australian Irrigation Areas data set and as non-agricultural land by the 1996/97 Land Use of Australia data set.The Version 1a data set may be of use to researchers and policy makers in need of national, regional or local scale irrigation data, though the scale of the source material is highly variable and completness of coverage is poor in some regions. See [further metadata](http://data.daff.gov.au/anrdl/metadata_files/pa_aia__r9ab __00211a02.xml) for more detail. Lineage: The data set was constructed in vector format by appending irrigation area boundary data sets supplied by various agencies. The component data sets are listed below. One of the component data sets which was supplied as separate tiles in ArcView shapefile format was assembled into a single shapefile data set in ArcView 3.1. All other processing was carried out in ARC/INFO 7.2.1 under SunOS using double precision coordinates. For all operations in which processing used a fuzzy tolerance, the value specified was 0.00001 degrees (about 1 m). The raster form of the data set was made from the vector form. 1) Ord River Scheme, Stage 1, irrigation area boundaries. This data set was supplied by Agriculture WA in ArcView shapefile format.2) Boundary of Gazetted Irrigation Areas in Queensland. This data set was supplied by the Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines in ARC/INFO export file format. It shows designated irrigation areas. The coordinate datum is not known with certainty and was assumed to be the Australian Geodetic Datum 1984.3) Northern Murray-Darling Basin irrigation area boundaries. This data set was supplied by the Murray-Darling Basin Commission in ARC/INFO export file format. It shows actual irrigation areas, based on interpretation of coarse scale imagery derived from Landsat TM images. The data set comprises 11 polygons. Of these, five have not been retained in the national data set because they largely coincide with the much higher resolution polygons of the Northern New South Wales Cotton Development data set. A sixth has not been retained because it proves to be almost entirely covered by a national park and a perennial lake. One of the polygons that was retained was edited to give precedence to a higher resolution polygon in the Boundary of Gazetted Irrigation Areas in Queensland data set which it partly overlies.4) Northern New South Wales Cotton