There are 14 Australian Marine Parks off the coast of Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, covering 702,033 square kilometres. Together they make up the South-east Network. These marine parks include striking features such as underwater canyons and mountains, as well as the diverse marine life associated with them, some of which is new to science and found nowhere else in the world. – Parks Australia

The South-east Network spans the shallow (<30 metres) to hadal (>6,000 metres) depth zones, with the majority of the Network (65%) falling within the abyssal zone (4,000-6,000 metres) [view on map].

Based on annotations from publicly available seafloor imagery (Squidle+), the five most dominant seafloor categories in this Network are:

• Shallow: no public imagery available
• Mesophotic: sand (42%), mixed invertebrate community (29%), sponges (12%), unidentified biota (5%), mixed coarse sediments (4%)
• Rariphotic: sand (69%), mixed invertebrate community (16%), mixed coarse sediments (7%), sponges (5%), unidentified biota (2%)
• Upper-slope: mixed coarse sediments (67%), consolidated hard substrata (30%), sand (2%), unidentified bare substrata (<1%), boulder (<1%)
• Mid-slope: consolidated hard substrata (28%), sand (28%), mixed coarse sediments (25%), coral biota (18%), boulder (1%)
• Lower-slope: no public imagery available
• Abyss: no public imagery available
• Hadal: no public imagery available

Read more about the South-east Network State of Knowledge (Parks Australia).