Surface Cover

Disclaimer

Geoscape Australia believes this publication to be correct at the time of printing and does not accept responsibility for any consequences arising from the use of the information herein. Readers should rely on their own skill and judgement to apply information to particular issues.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission of Geoscape Australia.

Overview

Surface Cover is a raster dataset representing land cover categories across Australia. Urban Surface Cover has coverage in pre-defined urban locations across Australia at 2 metre resolution, while the National Surface Cover has complete national coverage at 30 metre resolution.

Geoscape Australia welcomes your feedback on the Surface Cover Dataset. We also publish regular product development updates on our website (www.geoscape.com.au).

Release Summary

This product was released to customers on 30 June 2025 with data extracted on 18 June 2025.

• This release is a full national data population for Version 1.8 of the Surface Cover product, described by the Surface Cover Product Description v1.8.

Any issues that have been identified for this release are described in the Issues section.

This release includes updates for the areas listed in the table below.

Locations of updated areas by State.

State	Location	Urban Area (km2)
NSW	Shoalhaven City Council	43
NT	Alice Springs Municipality	54
QLD	Lockyer Valley Regional	3
QLD	Toowoomba Regional	164
SA	The Corporation of the City of Whyalla	26
SA	UIA Whyalla	9
VIC	Banyule City	24
VIC	Bayside City	15
VIC	Boroondara City	60
VIC	Brimbank City	73
VIC	Darebin City	22
VIC	Glen Eira City	37
VIC	Greater Dandenong City	1
VIC	Greater Geelong City	59
VIC	Hobsons Bay City	63
VIC	Hume City	13
VIC	Kingston City	4
VIC	Knox City	54
VIC	Macedon Ranges Shire	411
VIC	Manningham City	88
VIC	Maribyrnong City	31
VIC	Maroondah City	28
VIC	Melbourne City	38
VIC	Melton City	32
VIC	Merri-Bek City	20
VIC	Mitchell Shire	217
VIC	Monash City	81
VIC	Moonee Valley City	32
VIC	Moorabool Shire	10
VIC	Nillumbik Shire	4
VIC	Port Phillip City	21
VIC	Stonnington City	26
VIC	Whitehorse City	64
VIC	Whittlesea City	232
VIC	Wyndham City	447
VIC	Yarra City	20
WA	City of Albany	48
WA	City of Armadale	447
WA	City of Bayswater	35
WA	City of Belmont	40
WA	City of Canning	65
WA	City of Cockburn	150
WA	City of Fremantle	20
WA	City of Gosnells	99
WA	City of Joondalup	99
WA	City of Kalamunda	278
WA	City of Kalgoorlie-Boulder	40
WA	City of Kwinana	120
WA	City of Mandurah	92
WA	City of Melville	53
WA	City of Nedlands	20
WA	City of Perth	20
WA	City of Rockingham	212
WA	City of South Perth	20
WA	City of Stirling	105
WA	City of Subiaco	6
WA	City of Swan	913
WA	City of Vincent	11
WA	City of Wanneroo	249
WA	Shire of Beverley	4
WA	Shire of Boddington	6
WA	Shire of Chittering	221
WA	Shire of Gingin	1
WA	Shire of Mundaring	335
WA	Shire of Murray	462
WA	Shire of Northam	6
WA	Shire of Peppermint Grove	1
WA	Shire of Serpentine-Jarrahdale	559
WA	Shire of Toodyay	64
WA	Shire of Wandering	99
WA	Town of Bassendean	10
WA	Town of Cambridge	22
WA	Town of Claremont	5
WA	Town of Cottesloe	4
WA	Town of East Fremantle	4
WA	Town of Mosman Park	4
WA	Town of Victoria Park	18
Total		7,493

[1]

Location names are derived from an intersection with the most recent Local Government Area dataset, Geoscape, 2023.

Spatial files of the updated areas are available upon request via support@geoscape.com.au.

Change Notifications

No changes to note.

Issues

New Issues

No new issues to note.

Resolved Issues

GDA2020 Data Issue

A bug was found in the update process for the GDA2020 version of Surface Cover and Trees. This has led to rasters not being updated consistently between the GDA94 and GDA2020 versions. This issue has been resolved and for this release all affected GDA2020 rasters have been updated and will now align with their GDA94 counterpart.

Known Issues

The progress and status of known, ongoing issues are summarised below. For specific and further details on each issue, please refer to the Release Report identified in the ‘Release identified’ column.

Ongoing product issues

Release Identified	Theme - Issue Name	Issue Brief Description	Progress/Resolution	Status
Dec-16	Building - Tree heights near buildings and other trees	Terrain elevation values used in the calculation of tree heights have been found in some cases to be affected by the surrounding tall features such as buildings and other trees.	No update at this time.	Open
Apr-17	Urban and National Surface Cover - Shadow and Cloud	An increase in the amount of shadow found in the Surface Cover layer, in some circumstances, has impacted on the shape and height of buildings as well as surface cover and trees.	Geoscape has worked with its partners to limit the capture and use of imagery that contains significant cloud and shadow for future releases. The future maintenance programs will be targeting areas affected by significant cloud and shadow.	Open
Nov-21	Trees over-capture	On Buildings, it has been observed that there are some situations where significant portions of some roofs have been captured as tree features. This is different from actual tree overhang and may be due to some combination of building proximity to trees, dark roof colour and/or shadow across roofs. Tree features in Surface Cover, where they intersect with buildings, are retained and represented over building features. This is because tree over-hang does exist in the real world, and also to ensure these tree pixels correspond to the Trees product. In Dense, Shadowed and Water Areas, the spectral signature of these areas can incorrectly result in features being extracted as trees during remote sensing. Height calculation can help to exclude the majority of these during production, but where heights are determined to be greater than 2 metres they may persist.	We are working with our partner to limit these occurrences, as well as improving our processes to identify and correct the situations where they are present.	Open
Nov-21	Updates based on Tree and Buildings classes	Since November 2021 Updates are limited to Building, Tree and Unspecified Vegetation classes according to the captured aerial imagery for the Trees and Buildings products. If a building or tree pixel is no longer covered by building or trees features according to the update, it will be converted to Built-up Areas or Unspecified Vegetation, respectively. Where pixels are covered by Buildings, Trees or Unspecified Vegetation according to the update, they will be retained or updated accordingly.	Methods and sources to update additional Surface Cover classes beyond Building, Tree and Unspecified Vegetation are currently being investigated.
Jun-22	Over classification of building class	The building classification in areas updated for the November 2021 and March 2022 releases have not received the improved aerial building representation.	Resolved for updated areas in the June 2022 and November 2021 and March 2022 will be resolved in a future release.

Future Considerations

This section outlines enhancements or changes under consideration, but not planned into a specific release. For further details on future initiatives, please contact Geoscape Support.

Annex A – Release Counts

Urban Surface Cover Coverage

Total coverage of Urban Surface Cover by type

Code	Description	Total Area (km2)
2	Bare Earth	13180
3	Road and Path	2167
4	Grass	10418
5	Trees	9781
6	Unspecified Vegetation	8931
7	Built-up Areas	1353
8	Water	2199
9	Buildings	3594
10	Cloud	4
11	Shadow	364
12	Swimming Pool	30
13	Car Park	309

Total coverage of Urban Surface Cover by state

State	Total Area (km2)
QLD	12956
VIC	9830
ACTNSW	17757
TAS	1793
NT	986
SA	3711
WA	5297
National	52330

References

[Geoscape, 2023]

Geoscape. Local government areas. 2023. URL: https://docs.geoscape.com.au/projects/lga_guide/en/stable/index.html, arXiv:https://docs.geoscape.com.au/_/downloads/lga_guide/en/stable/pdf/.