Program Leader: Dr Peter Doherty, Australian Institute of
Marine Science
The Great Barrier Reef is Queensland’s largest and most
valuable environmental asset, deserving of its World Heritage
listing, and generating annually $5.8 billion gross value for
Australia (Access Economics 2005,
Measuring the Economic and Financial Value of the Great Barrier
Reef Marine Park). The largest industry in the Great Barrier
Reef Marine Park is marine tourism, which values environmental
quality.
Program 1 will focus on delivering robust indicators of reef
health and identifying thresholds of potential concern for the
Great Barrier Reef ecosystem. The Program contains two
long-term monitoring programs of iconic ecosystems (coral reefs and
seagrasses). The reports of condition and response will be
linked with research in other MTSRF Programs, notably those for
water quality and climate change. The Program will also
develop an early warning system for crown of thorns starfish to
allow the industry to prepare tactical responses. Support for
community-based monitoring (Reef Check) of tourism-intensive sites
will be a feature of the Program.
There will be two broad-scale assessments of
the ecological effects of the Great Barrier Reef Zoning Plan on
mid-shelf and outer-shelf reefs. This will be linked with
Zoning Plan assessments being undertaken by the MTSRF Sustainable
Use Program (Program 8) on inshore reefs and shoals, which will
also include social and economic indicators of changes associated
with the zoning.
The risk, mapping and monitoring products
generated by the Status and Trend Program are some examples of the
information feeds required to inform integrated, proactive
management. The full picture of raw information flows is very
complex. Thus, Program 1 will collaborate with the relevant
managing agencies and user groups to develop an Integrated Report
Card for the Great Barrier Reef that is a structured framework for
assimilating data from multiple sources with an emphasis on
quantitative indicators of condition and trend and performance
assessment of systems against thresholds of critical concern.
This type of information will be used to assist the managing
agencies in State of the Environment reporting, including
international obligations for World Heritage Periodic
reporting. This integration will be a distinguishing feature
from work done previously under the Australian Cooperative Research
Centre model and is the lead project in this Program. After
the first year, when the integrated framework is agreed, it is
expected that the data needs of the Integrated Report Card will
have a strong influence on the evolving shape of the Status and
Trends Program. Finally, the Program will strengthen
community support for, and use of, this product by linking
community-based action programs with the outputs of the Integrated
Report Card.
