AURICL: Australian Riverine landscape Classifier

AURICL (the Australian Riverscape Classification Service), a dynamic and flexible tool which allows users to classify tropical catchments and their rivers based on the similarity or dissimilarity of a wide range of parameters, such as soil type, water availability, topography, or average income and economic activity along the river.

» Access AURICL at OzCoasts

AURICL is currently in development and hosted by Geoscience Australia on the OzCoasts website (http://www.ozcoasts.gov.au/track). Building on Geoscience’s extensive web GIS system, this project will add catchments to the estuaries and coastline information already available. AURICL seeks to answer two questions: Where are the other rivers like this one? And, what category is this river?

By allowing analysis of more than 350,000 discrete river segments from the drainage network within the National Catchments Boundaries dataset, AURICL can generate a comparison or classification of a river segment, based on any combination of approximately 25 available attributes. Among other potential uses, this will help people locate priority research areas and define regions for management intervention.

At present the input data sets are organised under the broad headings of:

• Terrain
• Modelled Hydrology
• Landuse
• Geology
• Climate
• Socio economic

Information is available on <how AURICL works> and <who might use it>, however we are looking for specific scenarios about how you or your organisation might use AURICL and the Atlas.