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 Australia) 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 Trends Program are some examples of the
information required to inform integrated, proactive management.
The full picture of raw information flows is very complex. Thus,
the Program will collaborate with the relevant managing agencies
and user groups to provide information that will enable the
development of integrated reports for the Great Barrier Reef by
contributing to the e-Atlas (MTSRF
Project 1.1.5), which will utilise 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.
Moreover, the e-Atlas will provide the analytical tools to:
-
Model and map ecosystem properties;
-
Identify the main risk and resilience factors influencing the
Great Barrier Reef; and
-
Assess their biological, social and economic impacts.
This type of information will be used to assist the management
agencies involved in State of the Environment reporting,
particularly the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority
Outlook Report and international obligations for World Heritage
Periodic reporting, and will be a valuable for day-to-day
management of the GBR and for policy development. This integration
will be a distinguishing feature from work done previously under
the Cooperative Research Centre model and is the lead project in
this 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 data integration and
synthesis process.
