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.

Our recent four-year MTSRF project demonstrated significant export of larvae of the inshore coral trout species (Plectropomus maculatus) from existing no-take marine reserves (green zones) in the Keppel Island group on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). In addition, no-take reserves were shown to make a disproportionately large contribution to recruitment in fished areas (blue zones) at this location.

Implementation of networks of protected areas is the single most widely advocated action to protect marine biodiversity; the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park was one of the first and is one of the largest examples of such a network in the world. While some effects of marine protected areas can be seen rapidly, there are also long term changes that may develop over 1-2 decades. Surveys of the matched pairs of reefs during the term of the NERP Program will enable the longer-term effects of zoning to be assessed eight and ten years after the new zoning plan came into force.

Effective management of seabird populations on the Great Barrier Reef requires identifying the population-specific causes of current declines and their associated threatening processes. Without detailed information on foraging areas, resource use and links to oceanographic variation it is not possible to isolate or manage anthropogenic threats that occur outside of nesting colonies.

Sharks play an important role in marine ecosystems but are facing increasing pressure from fishing and other anthropogenic factors. Along the Queensland coast inshore waters play an important role as nursery areas for sharks. However, the same inshore waters are also most prone to fisheries exploitation and effects of freshwater discharge from coastal streams and rivers. This project will examine the importance of different types of inshore habitat (protected bay vs.

This project will develop a Management Strategy Evaluation (MSE) framework using a stakeholder driven approach to qualitatively integrate our understanding of the key drivers of change in the GBR inshore ecosystem and human uses, with an emphasis on biodiversity and inshore multi-species fisheries management.