Marine Cadastres – Challenges and Opportunities for Land Surveyors

This paper describes the marine cadastre concept, and reviews both the current and future directions of international and national marine cadastre initiatives. This includes an overview of the incentives, objectives, principle tasks and results of current research as well as reporting on the outcomes of the PCGIAP-International Workshop on administering the marine environment held in Malaysia in May 2004. The paper then endeavours to briefly explore the relevance of the marine cadastre concept to land surveyors. There has been international recognition of the need to improve administration of the marine environment, in particular focussing on managing the different and overlapping maritime boundaries and the need for access to marine related spatial data. Decisionmakers in both the land and marine environments will need access to this information to make effective and reliable decisions supporting marine administration. With this in mind, the Department of Geomatics at the University of Melbourne is involved in a number of national and international collaborative projects with a marine focus. One of the major projects is sponsored by the United Nations supported Permanent Committee on GIS Infrastructure for Asia and the Pacific (PCGIAP). The main objective of this project is to define the issues to be considered in developing a set of guidelines appropriate to the Asia and Pacific region for administrating the marine environment. The Department of Geomatics has also initiated research into problems relevant to the development of an Australian marine cadastre. The current project sponsored by the Australian Research Council focuses on four major research areas including resolving ambiguities in the definition of the tidal interface; using natural rather than artificial boundaries in a marine cadastre; expanding the Australian SDI to a support marine dimension; and legal and security issues intrinsic to the development of a marine cadastre. The outcomes from this research have generic application to other countries worldwide that have marine boundaries.