One hundred and twenty-six different layers of pressure data, with associated metadata records, have been collated and mapped for the Commonwealth Marine Reserve network. They include national summaries of the status of oil and gas extraction and infrastructure, seismic surveys, shipping movements, fisheries, aquaculture leases, pollution events, and trends and variability in ocean temperature.
Associated risks and impacts in relation to marine biodiversity were also identified by the NERP Marine Biodiversity Hub project. A simple data viewer has been developed to access the archived data on the Australian Ocean Data Network. The pressure maps are aggregated and displayed in five-year bins to match the State of the Environment reporting interval and to show whether pressures have increased or decreased in the past few decades.
The resulting capacity to assess the impacts of human activities on the marine environment will support assessments of cumulative and relative impact and risk, and the implementation of marine bioregional plans.