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A scheme, which can be readily used by fisheries and environmental managers and ecologists, has been developed for quantitatively classifying the different habitats found in nearshore marine waters along the heterogeneous lower west coast of Australia. Initially, 25 beach sites, representing a wide range of nearshore environments, were separated into six a priori habitat types on the basis of characteristics that could readily be observed and were likely to influence the extent to which a particular (fish) species occupies a particular habitat. Focus was thus placed on such features as the degree of exposure to wave activity and whether or not seagrass and/or reefs were present in the nearshore vicinity. Subsequently, quantitative data for 27 environmental variables, considered likely to characterise the six habitat types, were obtained for each of the 25 sites from readily accessible sources. When the latter data were …