Program Leader: Dr Chris Margules, CSIRO Tropical Forest
Research Centre
Program 2 will
report on the condition and trend of key environmental assets,
including ecosystem processes and biodiversity, in the Wet Tropics
rainforests and catchments. This Program will collate and
evaluate current knowledge on biodiversity and other environmental
assets delivered by ecosystem processes to provide a baseline for
comprehensive condition monitoring and reporting of the North
Queensland rainforest environmental assets.
The Program will build on
the existing metadata banks developed under the Rainforest CRCwith an
increased focus on the lowland rainforest areas that are
experiencing increased threatening processes. The Program
will be linked to projects within Theme 2 (Program 5ii), Theme 4
(Program 9) and Theme 5 (Program 10). Program 2 will
develop rainforest monitoring methods and then implement the
refined monitoring protocol on existing and newly focused
monitoring sites. In the process of doing this, it will
develop tools for measuring, monitoring and reporting, and identify
priorities for management action. The mining of existing data
sets and the focused monitoring program will produce a flow of
complex ecosystem information. Thus, the Program will
collaborate with the relevant managing agencies and user groups to
develop an Integrated Report Card for the Wet Tropics World
Heritage Area (WHA) and North Queensland’s coastal catchments
- 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 approach will be developed in
collaboration with Program 10 and the results will be used to
assist management agencies in State of the Environment
reporting, including international obligations for World Heritage
Periodic reporting.
Despite a number of
attempts to do so, there has never been an integrated monitoring
program across the Wet Tropics WHA that satisfies the reporting
requirements of the Wet Tropics Management Authority and the
Commonwealth Department of the Environment and Water Resources; nor
has one been available for the coastal catchments outside the
WHA. In part, this is because it has always been seen as too
costly, which in turn has been partly because no one has been able
to pin down a set of indicators that are both affordable and
sufficiently robust for reporting. This integration will be a
distinguishing feature from work done previously within the
Rainforest CRC. 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 this Program.
Program 2 currently involves one project:
Project
1.2.1 - Status and trends of biodiversity and ecosystem
services (Research Providers: CSIRO, JCU)
