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 31 March 2025 with data extracted on 20 March 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	Armidale Regional Council	45
NSW	Ballina Shire Council	30
NSW	Bayside Council	3
NSW	Blacktown City Council	7
NSW	Blue Mountains City Council	88
NSW	Byron Shire Council	46
NSW	Camden Council	41
NSW	Campbelltown City Council	95
NSW	Central Coast Council	389
NSW	Cessnock City Council	126
NSW	Clarence Valley Council	97
NSW	Coffs Harbour City Council	217
NSW	Federation Council	20
NSW	Georges River Council	10
NSW	Goulburn Mulwaree Council	45
NSW	Hawkesbury City Council	236
NSW	Lake Macquarie City Council	319
NSW	Lismore City Council	37
NSW	Liverpool City Council	8
NSW	Maitland City Council	133
NSW	Murray River Council	18
NSW	Newcastle City Council	151
NSW	Northern Beaches Council	71
NSW	Penrith City Council	3
NSW	Port Stephens Council	37
NSW	Shellharbour City Council	48
NSW	Shoalhaven City Council	43
NSW	Singleton Council	8
NSW	Sutherland Shire Council	114
NSW	Tamworth Regional Council	163
NSW	The Hills Shire Council	84
NSW	Wagga Wagga City Council	94
NSW	Wollondilly Shire Council	7
NSW	Wollongong City Council	170
NT	Alice Springs Municipality	54
NT	Darwin Municipality	91
NT	Darwin Waterfront Precinct Municipality	1
NT	Litchfield Municipality	243
NT	Northern Territory Rates Act (Prescribed Area A) Area	16
NT	Palmerston Municipality	55
QLD	Fraser Coast Regional	160
QLD	Gladstone Regional	50
QLD	Gympie Regional	84
QLD	Lockyer Valley Regional	177
QLD	Logan City	239
QLD	Noosa Shire	53
QLD	Scenic Rim Regional	10
QLD	Somerset Regional	1
QLD	Sunshine Coast Regional	350
QLD	Toowoomba Regional	164
SA	City of Mount Gambier	30
SA	The Corporation of the City of Whyalla	26
SA	The DC of Grant	5
SA	UIA Whyalla	9
TAS	Brighton Council	41
TAS	Burnie City Council	22
TAS	Clarence City Council	64
TAS	Glenorchy City Council	37
TAS	Hobart City Council	33
TAS	Kingborough Council	43
TAS	Launceston City Council	65
TAS	Meander Valley Council	5
TAS	Waratah-Wynyard Council	5
TAS	West Tamar Council	9
VIC	Campaspe Shire	24
VIC	Greater Geelong City	124
VIC	Greater Shepparton City	56
VIC	Indigo Shire	15
VIC	Queenscliffe Borough	6
VIC	Warrnambool City	40
WA	City of Albany	48
WA	City of Greater Geraldton	88
WA	City of Kalgoorlie-Boulder	40
WA	Shire of Chapman Valley	1
Total		5587

[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

No resolved issues to note.

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	13217
3	Road and Path	2165
4	Grass	10428
5	Trees	9974
6	Unspecified Vegetation	8768
7	Built-up Areas	1323
8	Water	2199
9	Buildings	3560
10	Cloud	4
11	Shadow	365
12	Swimming Pool	30
13	Car Park	297

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	52329

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/.