There are 13 Australian Marine Parks off the coast of Western Australia covering 335,341 square kilometres that make up the North-west Marine Parks Network. These marine parks include coral reefs, soft sediments, canyons and limestone pavements. Seabirds, sharks, whales, dolphins, marine turtles and dugong are found here. This allows visitors to experience wildlife around offshore reefs, islands, cays and in deeper waters. The iconic whale shark is found at Ningaloo, and every year humpback whales migrate through the region to and from their breeding grounds off the Kimberley coast. – Parks Australia

The North-west Network spans the shallow (<30 metres) to abyssal (4,000-6,000 metres) depth zones, with the majority of the Network (34%) 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: coral biota (43%), sand (23%), macroalgae (19%), unconsolidated hard substrata (6%), sponges (5%)
• Mesophotic to Upper-slope: no public annotations available
• Mid-slope: bioturbators (39%), invertebrates (36%), non-coral cnidaria (9%), sponges (5%), unidentified biota (3%)
• Lower-slope: bioturbators (41%), invertebrates (26%), sponges (20%), ascidians (4%), non-coral cnidaria (3%)
• Abyss: sponges (91%), seagrass (wrack) (3%), non-coral cnidaria (1%), other (1%), bioturbators (1%)