Water quality

The broad goal of this project is to identify strategic priorities for protection and restoration of coastal ecosystems that support the health and resilience of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area, in the context of changing land use, expanding infrastructure, and climate change. More specifically, the project will address three limitations of previous research and application in conservation planning. First, conservation planning has focused principally on snapshots of biodiversity and land uses, as if planning regions were static.

Seagrass meadows are a vital habitat in tropical coastal ecosystems: they support biodiversity of estuarine, coastal and reef communities, including fisheries species, and they are a direct food source for obligate seagrass feeders such as dugongs. Seagrass meadows in the coastal zone also form a buffer between the catchment and the reef, trapping sediments and absorbing nutrients, with their high productivity rates facilitating rapid nutrient cycling.

The objective of this project is to assess how management of local stressors such as land runoff can help improve the resilience of coral reefs to global stressors (climate change) which are more difficult to manage.

Our current knowledge of diversity of the Great Barrier Reef and the mechanisms that determine it are minimal.  Based on a new statistical model of diversity, researchers will map the diversities of biota and environments of the Reef, and will relate biotic diversity to spatial, environmental and temporal drivers. These relationships will be interpreted in the context of risk, zoning and management.

An understanding of the status of water quality in Torres Strait and its influence on marine foods, human health, marine ecosystems and ecological processes in the Strait is important.

To guide monitoring, management and mitigation decisions, researchers from CSIRO, JCU and AIMS propose to conduct a Phase 1 study to develop a robust approach that will allow them in Phase 2 to carry out an ecological risk assessment (ERA) of nutrients, fine suspended sediments, and pesticides used in agriculture in the Great Barrier Reef region, including ranking the relative risk of individual contaminants originating from priority catchments to the GBR ecosystems using a systematic, objective and transparent approach.

Phase 1 of the project aims to: