decision support systems

This project will partner the region’s key stakeholders to review, trial and evaluate the most effective governance systems and planning foundations for regional and landscape scale adaptation to climate change. In particular, within the context of these governance systems and planning arrangements, it will focus on the potential application of emerging ecosystem service markets to secure landscape scale resilience for biodiversity in the face of climate change.

The key intent of the Project will be to:

This project will fill critical information gaps about the relative importance of key attributes (or ‘values’) associated with the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area to a variety of different stakeholders and about the way in which those ‘values’ might be effected by a range of external influences (e.g. different types of economic development, increases in population, changes in the mix of visitors).

Planning systems, governance structures and institutions that capture the traditional knowledge and associations of Indigenous peoples into biodiversity decision-making and management remain elusive. Key planning initiatives in the Wet Tropics region have advanced the institutional capability to engage Indigenous peoples into biodiversity management, including the Wet Tropics Regional Agreement, the Aboriginal Cultural and Natural Resource Management Plan, several Indigenous Land Use Agreements (ILUA), and the nomination for national heritage listing of the Aboriginal cultural values.

Managers of the world heritage Great Barrier Reef have repeatedly made stronger calls for social science data to assist them in their day-to-day duties. Researchers of Project 10.1 will work directly with the GBRMPA, DEEDI, GBRF, DERM, industry and community to develop world-class social and economic research that will directly facilitate the management of the Great Barrier Reef.

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.

The broad goal of this project is to work collaboratively with Commonwealth and Queensland Government agencies to develop an explicit decision making framework for investing cost-effectively in management actions across the islands of the Great Barrier Reef. More specifically, the goal is to maximise a conservation outcome, defined by specific objectives for diverse natural features (e.g.

Understanding temporal and spatial patterns of vulnerability under environmental impacts and change is central to the management of marine parks. Quantitative assessments of vulnerability, however, are one of the greatest challenges for management planning of coral reef ecosystems, including the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). One reason is the lack of a functional operational framework that can link environmental factors to vulnerability via physical, biological and ecological processes and their interactions.