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This study has developed quantitative approaches for firstly classifying local-scale nearshore habitats in an estuary and then predicting the habitat of any nearshore site in that system. Both approaches employ measurements for a suite of enduring environmental criteria that are biologically relevant and can be easily derived from readily available maps. While the approaches were developed for south-western Australian estuaries, with a focus here on the Swan and Peel-Harvey, they can easily be tailored to any system. Classification of the habitats in each of the above estuaries was achieved by subjecting to hierarchical agglomerative clustering (CLUSTER) and a Similarity Profiles test (SIMPROF), a Manhattan distance matrix constructed from measurements of a suite of enduring criteria recorded at numerous environmentally diverse sites. Groups of sites within the resultant dendogram that were shown by …