There are 14 Australian Marine Parks off the coast of South Australia and Western Australia covering 508,371 square kilometres that make up the South-west Marine Parks Network. These parks include mid-slope terraces, deep abyssal plains, marginal plateaus, underwater mountain chains and submarine canyons – including Australia’s largest underwater canyon, the Perth Canyon. Biodiversity hotspots include the unique mix of temperate and tropical marine species that inhabit the waters of the Houtman Abrolhos Islands, Recherche Archipelago, and the world’s richest known temperate soft sediment communities in the Great Australian Bight. Endangered southern right whales migrate through the region to coastal waters off South Australia and Western Australia, and colonies of sea lions live alongside blue whales, humpback whales and seabirds. – Parks Australia

The South-west Network spans the shallow (<30 metres) to hadal (>6,000 metres) depth zones, with the majority of the Network (59%) 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: soft substrata (67%), macroalgae (33%)
• Mesophotic: macroalgae (61%), sand (29%), sponges (4%), mixed coarse sediments (2%), unidentified (1%)
• Rariphotic: sand (54%), unidentified (21%), sponges (9%), mixed invertebrate community (8%), macroalgae (3%)
• Upper-slope to Lower-slope: no public annotations available
• Abyss to Hadal: no public imagery available