Oil Spill Response Atlas

The National Plan to Combat Pollution of the Sea by Oil and other Noxious and Hazardous Substances

In 1998 the Federal Environment Minister Senator Hill announced the allocation of $1 million under the Natural Heritage Trust, Coasts and Clean Seas Program to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) to fast track the production of a computerised Oil Spill Response Atlas for Australia.

The major outcome of this project was to produce a complete and uniform National Oil Spill Response Atlas (OSRA) for Australia in a computerised Geographic Information System (GIS).

Oil and chemical spills in the marine environment can have wide spread impact and long-term consequences on wildlife, fisheries, coastal and marine habitats, human health and livelihood, as well as recreational resources of coastal communities. Resource atlases containing coastal and marine environmental information are an essential tool in contingency planning and in decision making during a marine pollution incident. These atlases provide a means of determining marine and coastal areas of sensitivity that could be impacted in the event of a pollution incident as well as providing valuable resource and logistical information for combat authorities.

Detailed computerised environmental resource atlases help identify marine and foreshore ecosystems and biological resources for the determination of protection priorities and provide information to authorities on response options for example for boom deployment, chemical dispersant use, foreshore clean-up techniques to be employed and disposal sites for wastes generated.

The OSRA program’s prime aim was to systematically compile all relevant geographic and textual data into a standard GIS format for the majority of Australia’s maritime and coastal environments.

National OSRA datasets include:

biological, environmental, wildlife and man-made resources present Australia wide;
geomorphological mapping and shoreline sensitivity to oil spills;
human-use resource considerations; and
logistical and infrastructure information to support a spill response.

OSRA provides non-strategic environmental layers for distribution through the Australian Coastal Atlas (ACA) State/NT Internet computer nodes provided by ERIN. OSRA will also be linked with AMSA’s maritime search and rescue and spill trajectory models as well as emergency contact lists and other decision support systems.

Examples of the information available in OSRA together with examples demonstrating the ability of the GIS to integrate different forms of geographic and image information are shown in figures 1, 2 and 3.

In Figure 1 a section of Western Port Bay OSRA GIS is reproduced showing the location of seagrass beds, coastal types, botanical sites and important bird colonies. Each environmental theme or data layer can be switched on or off, panned, expanded or reduced depending upon the users needs and required scale.

Figure 1. Example of Western Port Bay Oil Spill Response Atlas

In Figure 2 an example of the northern section of Port Phillip Bay ORA GIS is reproduced with a simulated oil slick from an oil off loading facility. Bird habitats, seagrass beds, abalone beds are overlayed on an aerial photographs of the region of the spill and impact zones.

Figure 2. Simulated oil spill in Port Phillip Bay- Victorian OSRA Project

Figure 3 demonstrates the use of the OSRA system to combine nautical charts, environmental information in an actual ship grounding in Cape York Queensland. The locations of coral reefs, mangroves, sea grass beds, dugong sittings, significant sea bird colonies, turtle rookeries and feeding areas are superimposed on the nautical chart in the area of Piper Reef where a vessel had run aground and was at risk of spilling its bunker fuel oil. An area was identified by responders where oil spill dispersants could be used if the vessel's bunker fuel oil tanks had breached and would threaten foreshore resources.

Figure 3. Example of the ability of GIS to integrate spill response planning information with nautical charts and environmental resources for the grounding of the Peacock in Cape York Australia

OSRA incorporates the complete Australia wide set of scanned and GIS-ready nautical charts. This also includes those nautical charts available for offshore and remote Australian islands and territories.

High resolution SPOT satellite imagery for all major ports, harbours and environmentally significant areas of the Australian coast have also been loaded onto the OSRA GIS.

The OSRA system will be linked to AMSA's Oil Spill Trajectory Model, specialised pollution equipment databases (MOSES), Search and Rescue coordination and other Federal, State and NT databases.

OSRA provides Australian State, Territory and Commonwealth agencies with vital environmental resource information in a direct and easily manageable form to allow more efficient and effective response to oil and chemical spills in the marine environment.

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Other sources of information

Environment Resource Information Networks, Australian Coastal Atlas (ACA) project: Australia's Environmental Portal

OSRA Policy and Management Guidelines

For more information on OSRA contact Environment Protection Response

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last updated: 19 October 2006