Tourism and sugar mills in the Great Barrier Reef coastal zone (NERP TE 9.4, JCU)

This dataset corresponds to the polygon digitisation of tourism sites and sugar mills. The locations of the tourism sites were obtained from a commercial database of tourism operators (Australian Tourism Warehouse). The location of sugar mills was obtained from information gathered on the internet and point locations were created for each mill. These datasets were developed to fill in missing source datasets for the scenario modelling used for the coastal development modelling. The tourism dataset was incorporated to the 2009 QLUMP to provide inclusion of tourism land use in this dataset. The sugar mill dataset was developed to provide the distances from sugar land use to mill and determine the restrictions for future expansion.

Methods:

Tourism dataset: Tourism corresponds to the official definition used by the World Trade Organisation as "Tourism comprises the activities of persons travelling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes." It is generally accepted that in most instances tourism activities are conducted from approximately 50km of the domicile. The definition of tourism land use in this study is areas with infrastructure and areas of cleared land that would not have existed if it were not for demand from tourism and hospitality and the ability to gain economic benefits from that tourism as well as urban zones created to accommodate required staff and services, green areas etc. Tourism land use is not part of the QLUMP land use map. It was manually added to this dataset using data on tourism infrastructure from a private company (the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse) that registers tourism-related businesses and records geographical coordinates of businesses. Buffers around point locations were created to acknowledge for different sizes of buildings/carparks etc. Governmental data of recreational areas and airport facilities obtained from GeoScience Australia were added. The tourism layer was improved but is still not inclusive of all tourism area in 2013.

Sugar mill dataset: The location of sugar mills was obtained from information gathered on the internet and point location were created for each mill. It includes Mossman mill, Pleystowe mill, Raceway mill, Marian mill, Farleigh mill, Tableland mill, Mulgrave central mill, Babinda mill, South Johnstone mill, Tully mill, Victoria mill, Macknade mill, Invicta mill, Pioneer mill, Kalamia mill, Inkerman mill, Prosperine mill, Plane creek mill.

Format:

GBR_TourismLandUse2013.shp (and associated files as part of shapeflie)
This layer is a polygon shapefile representing all areas of land use associated with tourism in the GBR coastal zone.

GBR_CoastSugarMills2013.shp (and associated files as part of shapeflie)
This layer is a point shapefile containing all locations of sugar mills in operation as in March 2013 in the GBR coastal region or in close proximity.