Recent datasets

A key criteria for inscription of the Great Barrier Reef as a World Heritage Area is Criteria (VII) – exceptional natural beauty & aesthetic importance. Our project will work across social and ecological disciplines to identify, for the first time, indicators that will enable managers to measure and monitor aesthetic values for the GBRWHA.

This project will deliver two outcomes: (i) understanding of how water quality (WQ) exposure affects the ability of corals to resist and recover from bleaching, (ii) a modelling framework to identify management options that would mitigate the effects of warming on reefs exposed to WQ pressures. Using SeaSim experiments and field data, we examine which WQ parameters (nutrients/light/turbidity) affect corals’ thermal tolerance, and assess how temperature and WQ exposure histories affected coral bleaching and recovery during the 2016 bleaching event.

Over 50 land-sourced pesticides have been detected in waters of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and its catchments. Previous studies on the risks posed by pesticides have focused on five priority PSII herbicides. However, other pesticides are increasingly being used, for which there are few fate, persistence and toxicity data. In order to improve water quality guidelines and assessments of the potential risks posed by these “alternate” pesticides to GBR and its catchments we will quantify their toxicity to freshwater and marine species.

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Crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) management requires decisions be made about where to invest control effort in order to achieve regional scale objectives, e.g. to modify COTS spread or to facilitate coral recovery. However, no objective basis for choosing sites exists, beyond their economic importance, meaning that achieving these important goals is largely left to chance.

This study uses evaluation of past investments to demonstrate effectiveness, and enable improved targeting, of riparian remediation works for reducing streambank erosion to achieve improved water quality outcomes within the Great Barrier Reef.

Alluvial gullies have been shown to be major sources of fine sediment and nutrients to the GBR lagoon, and yet to date there is no accepted practice as to how these major pollution sources can be stabilised and rehabilitated.

Building on the work of the work of the GBR RIMReP Program Design Group, this project will develop cost-effective indicators and metrics for human dimension outcomes, objectives and targets in the Reef 2050 Plan, consistent with the Drivers-Pressures-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework. It will add value to and ensure continuity with information collected through the Social and Economic Long-Term Monitoring Program for the Great Barrier Reef (SELTMP).

The Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area (GBRWHA), globally recognised for its outstanding universal value, is an integrated and highly connected part of a larger northeast Australia marine bioregion, which includes Torres Strait, the Coral Sea and the Great Sandy Marine Park (Hervey Bay). Understanding the values (ecological, cultural, social and economic) of these adjacent systems, and especially the connections and interdependencies between systems, is crucial to effective and efficient protection and management of the globally important natural and cultural values within each system.

This project will enable reduced DIN exports from cane lands by developing and promoting a tested framework for commercial insurance businesses to underwrite risk of nitrogen practice change in sugarcane farming. We will work with insurance, other relevant businesses and, potentially, government to determine the methods and precision for assessing risk.

This project will scope opportunities for water quality credit trading, and develop trading frameworks for managing nitrogen and sediment along the Reef coast. The objective is to determine whether trading in water quality credits can cost-effectively offset emissions increases from future economic expansion, whilst ensuring that end-of-catchment pollution loads stay within designated nitrogen and sediment limits. The project will also estimate how revenues from credit trading could potentially stimulate rural economies and create jobs by incentivising innovative business opportunities.

In pursuit of delivering multiple benefits across multiple ecosystems such as freshwater estuaries, wetlands and reefs, this project will work in partnership with industry, extension, NRM, research and government organizations to develop and deploy an irrigation system that is automatically controlled by remotely accessing feedback from the IrrigWeb decision support tool. Irrigweb provides optimal irrigation schedules on a paddock-by-paddock basis by linking information about climate, soils and management regimes.

This metadata record describes chlorophyll fluorescence and turbidity time-series data collected through in situ monitoring by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Monitoring Program for Inshore Water Quality (MMP WQ). A full description of the MMP WQ and its associated datasets can be found in the parent metadata record linked above. Continuous in situ chlorophyll fluorescence and turbidity were measured using WET Labs ECO FLNTUSB Combination Fluorometer and Turbidity Sensors. The MMP WQ currently has instruments deployed at 19 sites summarised by Natural Resource Management (NRM) region below.

This dataset corresponds to a reformatting of the SRTM30_PLUS digital elevation dataset from 33 NetCDF files into a single GeoTiff for use in GIS applications. No other modifications to the data were done. The rest of this metadata describes the original SRTM30_PLUS dataset itself. Note: The SRTM15_plus dataset is a similar more recent, higher resolution bathymetry dataset https://topex.ucsd.edu/WWW_h...plus.html.

Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software. Natural Earth was built through a collaboration of many volunteers and is supported by NACIS (North American Cartographic Information Society). Natural Earth Vector comes in ESRI shapefile format, the de facto standard for vector geodata. Character encoding is Windows-1252.

This dataset corresponds to the zoning within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park effective 1st July 2004. It is derived from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Zoning Plan 2003. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park is a multiple-use area. Zoning helps to manage and protect the values of the Marine Park that users enjoy. Zoning Plans define what activities occur in which locations both to protect the marine environment and to separate potentially conflicting activities.

This dataset corresponds to a shapefile that defines the COTS initiation zone for use in the evaluation of the merit of investment in surveillance and cull and reducing agricultural run off. The COTS box is a speculative area of primary outbreaks of Crown-of-Thorns Starfish. This polygon includes Lizard island to the north and Green Island in the south. Methods: The polygon was drawn free hand in ArcMap based on the requirement to cover all reefs from Green Island to just north of Lizard Island without cutting through any reefs.

The project will use novel analytical techniques/instrumentation to accurately quantify, for the first time, key proximal stressors associated with dredging/spoil disposal (i.e. sedimentation, light quantity/quality, suspended sediment concentrations) and will determine how these parameters vary with increasing distance from dredging. We will then test the response of corals, sponges, seagrass and algae to environmentally relevant/realistic conditions over appropriate time-frames.

This dataset consists of summaries of benthic, fish and manta tow surveys conducted in the Capricorn-Bunker Region of the Great Barrier Reef in October 2015. It consists of three tables: 1. A table summarising percent cover of benthic organisms grouped into broad categories from photo transects collected during the monitoring surveys. 2. A table of average abundance for each reef fish species on the 5 transects in each of the three sites on each reef is presented for the eight reefs surveyed. 3.

This dataset summarises benthic surveys of seagrass for Dugong and Turtle habitats in the North-West Torres Strait for November 2015 and January 2016. The Site data describes seagrass at 853 sites; while the Meadow data describes seagrass at 34 individual meadows. The data includes information on seagrass species, biomass, diversity, and BMI and algae percent cover. The dataset is available as shapefiles, GIS layer packages, and/or a CSV file.

This dataset shows the measured response of early life history stages to different levels of nutrient enrichment and temperatures in experiments conducted in 2014-2015. The data is presented as one Excel spreadsheet file. Each tab contains data from experiments (Exp. 1a,b; Exp 1c,d; Exp. 2; Exp 3) on different life stages exposed to the same conditions. Measured logged water quality (Nutrients) and temperature (Temperature) data taken during the experiment are also presented in different tabs.