The Water Districts data set contains the boundaries of Water Districts proclaimed under the Water Management Act 1999. The data set is made up of 5 categories of Water Districts. These are Irrigation Districts, Drainage Districts, Riverworks Districts, Hydro-Electric Districts & Water Supply Districts. Not all Water Supply Districts are included at this stage.

The Rights in Water and Irrigation Act 1914 provides the Governor of Western Australia the power to proclaim or prescribe through regulation a Surface Water Area. A Surface Water Area is proclaimed for the purposes of regulating the taking of water from watercourses and wetlands. An area is proclaimed, or prescribed through regulations, where there is a need for systematic management of the use of water. The proclamation is made on the recommendation of the Department and must first be tabled before both Houses of Parliament. Proclaiming or prescribing an area has the effect of allowing the use of water for commercial activity under a licence. Where an area has been proclaimed, the provisions of Division 1B of Part III of the Act apply to surface water in that area. This allows comprehensive management of water uses in that area. This dataset defines the boundaries which are proclaimed as Irrigation Districts (IDs) under the Rights in Water and Irrigation Act, 1914 (RIWI Act). In addition to the boundary definition within the Act these areas are subject to Division 1B of the Act which implements licensing of water use from watercourses and wetlands in the area. Irrigation districts are areas where the Water Corporation or another service provider may construct work and supply water to land owners for irrigation purposes. This dataset is the result of combining three existing datasets; RIWI Areas, RIWI Irrigation Districts and RIWI Surface Water Areas. It replaces all three. This dataset was formerly known as RIWI Act, Surface Water Areas and Irrigation Districts (DOW-019)

Boundaries defining the approximate jurisdiction of the Rural Water Corporations in Victoria.

The LIST Land District Boundaries data set contains those 20 Land Districts that divide Tasmania into administrative areas used when defining the granting and derivation of land. Land Districts were formerly known as Counties. A Land District may contain a number of Parishes with those Parish boundaries forming the Land District boundary. Land Districts may still be referred to on Land Titles relating to the derivation of the land.

Groundwater areas proclaimed under the Rights in Water and Irrigation Act, 1914. For the purposes of groundwater resource management, the state of Western Australia is divided into groundwater areas. The extraction and licensing of groundwater resources are managed within groundwater areas. This dataset was formerly known as RIWI Act, Groundwater Areas (DOW-012)

This dataset identifies the Management Areas declared under the Waterways Conservation Act 1976. Under the Waterways Conservation Act 1976, the Minister for Water and the Department of Water and Environmental Regulation have responsibility for the conservation of the waters and associated land in five declared Management Areas. The declared Management Areas are Albany waterways, Avon River, Wilson Inlet, Peel Inlet and Leschenault Inlet. The Department of Water and Environmental Regulation has an approval process for certain works affecting waterways and foreshore areas and can provide advice on other developments affecting, or likely to affect, the condition and public amenity of these waterways. Key aspects of the Act relate to protecting and managing the condition and amenity of waterways when there are disturbance activities within or adjacent to the Management Areas. Activities within or adjacent to the Management Area that should be referred to the Department of Water and Environmental Regulation for discussion or licensing include: changes or intensification of land use adjacent to or impacting on waterways or their foreshore areas (e.g. land planning, development, mining, mineral exploration, drainage or flood risk management proposals) dredging, reclamation, dewatering, drainage and construction activities including retaining walls, jetties, private boat ramps or public facilities other activities that may affect declared management areas, for example, those that may increase nutrients. Further information and advice can be sought from Department of Water and Environmental Regulation's regional offices. Contact information for regional offices is available at the Department of Water website.

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

For the purposes of groundwater resource management, the state of Western Australia is divided into groundwater areas proclaimed under the Rights in Water and Irrigation Act 1914. These groundwater areas are further subdivided into groundwater subareas. The subareas are not proclaimed, but are administrative boundaries used to manage the abstraction and licensing of groundwater resources.