assessment

The Great Barrier Reef Outlook Report 2009 is a stock-take of the Great Barrier Reef, its management and its future.

The aim of the Outlook Report is to provide information about:

Dr. Simpfendorfer is the Director of the Centre for Sustainable Tropical Fisheries and Aquaculture at JCU. He has had more than 25 years experience researching sharks, and has published extensively in the scientific literature on shark biology, ecology, fisheries and conservation. His expertise on sharks has been recognized by his appointment as the Co-Chair of the IUCN’s Shark Specialist Group and as the Chair of the Australian Fisheries Management Authority’s Shark Resource Assessment Group.

Dr. Dichmont is a Stream Leader in the Northern Fisheries and Ecosystems Research Program at CSIRO. She has a national and international reputation in stock assessment, modeling natural systems, natural resource management, shared fisheries stocks, and management strategy evaluation and has been a principal investigator in numerous collaborative and multi-disciplinary projects over her career.

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.

This project proposes to provide information and tools to enable scientists and management agencies to predict and limit the impacts of extreme climatic events on Australia’s biodiversity.  It aims to determine the exposure, sensitivity and vulnerability of Wet Tropics biodiversity to climatic extremes, and assess contemporary and future impacts.

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.

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