NESP MaC Project 3.5 – Supporting regional planning in northern Australia: Building knowledge, skills and partnerships for understanding seagrass distribution, 2023-2026 (JCU, CDU, ECU)

This record provides an overview of the NESP Marine and Coastal Hub study - Project 3.5 – Supporting regional planning in northern Australia: Building knowledge, skills and partnerships for understanding seagrass distribution. For specific data outputs from this project, please see child records associated with this metadata. Northern Australia has vast development opportunities but limited knowledge of the environment to inform decision making. This region has globally significant seagrass habitat, supporting dugong, green turtle, and commercially important fish and prawns. Key to managing impacts to species in these habitats is reliable data on seagrass distribution and how this changes over time. Achieving this requires large-scale mapping and a ranger-led monitoring network in remote communities. This project will map seagrass habitats across northern Australia through targeted mapping expeditions in data deficient regions. It will strengthen relationships with coastal communities, build-on existing knowledges and skills, co-design training resources with rangers to undertake monitoring, trial new technologies for monitoring, and synthesise historical and new seagrass data into an open access resource. Planned Outputs • Spatial GIS datasets [seagrass surveys] • Synthesised historical compilation [spatial dataset] • Final technical report with analysed data and a short summary of recommendations for policy makers of key findings [written]