Environment Australia is tasked with managing the networks of Commonwealth Marine Reserves. This is particularly challenging in the remote and poorly known N and NW regions. For example, managers need to understand how biodiversity varies across these regions, but no dataset of this exists. To provide a starting point for building this knowledge, researchers from Australia's NESP Marine Biodiversity Hub's D1 project here highlight five key environmental variables that may help predict biodiversity patterns across the regions.
These variables were identified because continuous datasets of them are available over the entire N and NW regions, and they serve as proxies for other variables that may more directly affect biodiversity. For example, no regional-scale dataset of substrate hardness currently exists, but available datasets of bottom current velocity and geomorphic features help determine substrate hardness patterns.
Click on the name of each environmental variable in the list below (originals were: depth, sediment grain size, chlorophyll-a, geomorphic features and bottom current velocity) to view an interactive map and read more about it. More datasets will be added to this section as they become available.
