Summary
The Australian Antarctic Division is responsible for management of 42% of the Antarctic continent, equivalent to 3/4 the size of Australia. Management of such a large and remote area creates many practical difficulties, not least of which is the storage and recovery of information on which effective management should be based. When the Antarctic Division looked at a system of providing information to assist with management of Antarctic tourism it became clear that information relevant to tourism would also be useful for managing other Antarctic activities such as our own expeditions. The Australian Antarctic Division holds much information that is relevant to management of the Antarctic Territory but most of it is not managed effectively and is not in a form that can be shared or accessed easily. The Environmental Atlas is a pilot project that identifies key information sources, structures and linkages, and brings these together on a public web site. The term Environmental Atlas was adopted because much of the information is spatial or geographic in nature and the atlas will be structured to provide information about locations.