With increasing human populations in coastal regions, there is growing concern over the quality of wastewater treatment plant (WTP) discharge and its impacts on coastal biodiversity, recreational amenities, and human health. In Australia, the current system of WTP monitoring and reporting varies across states and jurisdictions leading to a lack of data transparency and accountability, leading to a reduced ability to comprehensively assess regional and national scale biodiversity impacts and health risks. The National Outfall Database (NOD) was developed to provide a centralized spatial data management system for sharing and communicating comprehensive, national-scale WTP pollutant data. This research describes the structure of the NOD and through self-organizing maps and principal component analysis, provides a comprehensive, national-scale analysis of WTP effluent. Such a broad understanding of the constituents and level of pollutants in coastal WTP effluent within a public database provides for improved transparency and accountability and an opportunity to evaluate health risks and develop national water quality standards.

Map-based portals are important to ensure current, relevant and reliable marine ecological data is readily available to a wide-range of users and stakeholders. This report describes the outcomes of a Marine Biodiversity Hub workshop held in July 2019 that hosted a discussion on “Map Based Portals for Marine Science Communication and Discovery”. Sixteen existing map-based web portals were presented and discussed with a range of end users to review and learn from the national experience. The users requirements were captured through the narrative of “User stories”, which provided useful information of explanations of the different portal features. We mapped the synergies between existing services, and using the “The Marine Data Landscape” presented at the workshop identified a variety of gaps, and captured new suggestions for future developments, including an assessment on the priority and feasibility of these new initiatives. Recommendations are provided to progress portal development.