Program 5 'Cumulative impacts on benthic biodiversity'

Program 5 will have three projects designed to assess the impacts of cumulative pressures on coastal biodiversity in the GBR. One will be a synthesis and analysis of spatial and temporal patterns of inshore biodiversity seeking to partition the influence of different environmental drivers (water quality, crown of thorns starfish, cyclones, and connectivity) and identify synergistic interactions between stressors. The other two will be multi-factorial experiments exposing corals and seagrasses to different combinations of stressors in order to incorporate cumulative hazards into quantitative risk models.