Intertidal environments support important ecological habitats (e.g. sandy beaches and shores, tidal flats and rocky shores and reefs), and provide many valuable benefits such as storm surge protection, carbon storage and natural resources for recreational and commercial use. However, intertidal zones are faced with increasing threats from coastal erosion, land reclamation (e.g. port construction), and sea level rise. Accurate elevation data describing the height and shape of the coastline is needed to help predict when and where these threats will have the greatest impact. However, this data is expensive and challenging to map across the entire intertidal zone of a continent the size of Australia.

While previous DEA products describe the extent of the Australian intertidal zone (the Intertidal Extents Model or ITEM), the National Intertidal Digital Elevation Model (NIDEM) project aimed to build on ITEM to provide the first continentally-consistent source of intertidal elevation data across the entire Australian coastline.