monitoring

Having locals identify environmental research needs for their own community is a key step to ensuring that research is relevant, appropriate and desirable for communities.

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:

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority seeks to develop a socio-economic monitoring program, but there are a vast number of variables (or ‘indicators’) that could, potentially, be monitored and monitoring is not a costless exercise. So, it is important to ensure that the variables selected for ‘monitoring’, are ones which, (a) provide reliable, relevant information, which (b) measure interactions between sub-systems (e.g. socio-economic and biophysical) and which (c) are clearly associated with the Authority’s primary goal of protecting the Reef, i.e.

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.

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.

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.

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:

Monitoring is a fundamental component of the management of threatened species and is of particular importance when those species come into direct conflict with humans and their interests.  In such circumstances up-to-date information on population status, trends and distribution become key inputs into decision making. In these circumstances, systematic, objective and transparent data is critical to the acceptance of the decision making process.

Ten frog species disappeared from the upland rainforests of the Wet Tropics and Eungella during outbreaks of amphibian chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, representing 25% of the frogs endemic to the Wet Tropics and all of the Eungella endemics.  Five of these species occurred only in the uplands and have been presumed extinct because no individuals have been found despite intensive searches. This represents a significant loss of endemic species diversity, particularly in the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area.

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - monitoring