Brisbane GIS Layers

Working with Brisbane's Layers: What to Look For

Brisbane is a rewarding city to explore through GIS because so much of its character comes from the interaction of river, floodplain and ridgeline. Before loading any dataset, it helps to think about the question you want to answer. A walker planning a route through the western suburbs, a student comparing housing density across the inner north, and a resident checking how a creek behaves after heavy rain will each need quite different layers.

Core layers worth combining

• Elevation and terrain: Digital elevation models show how the Brisbane River has carved its meandering course and why suburbs such as Paddington and Red Hill sit on steep spurs while places like Rocklea and the Oxley Creek corridor are low and flat.
• Hydrology and flooding: Catchment boundaries, waterways and flood overlays explain much of the city's history, including the major floods of 1974 and 2011. Flood mapping is published by local and state government. Always rely on the official versions for property decisions.
• Land use and zoning: Planning layers reveal how industrial strips follow the river and rail lines, and how bushland reserves such as the D'Aguilar Range fringe the urban edge.
• Census geography: Australian Bureau of Statistics boundaries allow population, age and household data to be mapped at fine scales.

Practical tips

Check the coordinate reference system of every layer. Australian data is commonly supplied in GDA94 or the newer GDA2020 datum, and mixing them without reprojecting can shift features by more than a metre. Read the metadata for the date of capture and the licence terms, since many Queensland and Brisbane datasets are released under open Creative Commons licences that require attribution. Free tools such as QGIS handle all of these formats well and are a sensible starting point for beginners.

Desk analysis becomes far more meaningful when you test it on the ground. Our field trips often visit the very landscapes these layers describe. Further reading on mapping and local geography can be found among our publications.