Australia's River Basins 1997 (GA)

Australia's River Basins 1997 is the result of a joint State, Territory and Commonwealth Government project to create a national spatial database of major hydrological basins. It shows the boundaries of Australia's basins as defined by the Australian Water Resources Management Committee (WRMC).

Australia is divided into drainage divisions which are sub-divided into water regions which are in-turn sub-divided into river basins. The data includes the name and number of each of the 245 drainage basins, 77 regions, and 12 divisions.

The former Australian Water Resources Council (AWRC) formally defined the drainage divisions and river basins in the early 1960s and, with minor modifications resulting from improved mapping of the inland arid zone area, has been the basis for the study of Australian hydrology since. The drainage divisions were defined by both the major topographic features of the continent and the main climatic zones to give broadly homogenous hydrologic regions. Within the drainage divisions, the river basins are defined by the major watershed lines.

Data for basin boundaries have been captured by relevant State and Territory authorities from 1:10000 and 1:250 000 scale source material. The balance of the data are from Geoscience Australia's GEODATA Coast 100K which includes coastlines and State and Territory borders.

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