Brief description
Ecosystem-scale networks of marine protected areas (MPA) are an important planning tool, but the information used to delineate ecological units is difficult to quantify at broad spatial scales because of the cost associated with collecting information at that scale. The Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area (GBRWHA) is the world’s largest World Heritage area (approximately 348,000 km2) and second largest MPA. To inform the management of inshore (<15 m) seagrass communities at the scale of the entire GBRWHA, we determined their presence and distribution at a regional and sub- regional scale by generating a GIS-based habitat model. We chose a Bayesian network (BN) to investigate dependencies among seagrass responses and environmental drivers that included: relative exposure (a function of wind intensity and topography), bathymetry, presence of flood plumes, season, region, tidal range, and sea surface temperature. We found that at the scale of the entire GBRWHA, the main drivers of inshore seagrass presence are tidal range and relative exposure. The outputs of our analysis included a probabilistic GIS-surface of inshore seagrass presence and distribution for both the wet and dry seasons, and across four regions at the scale of 2km*2km planning units. The model can be used by managers in the GBRWHA to delineate seagrass ecological units, and assist them in marine planning at broad spatial scales.
Notes
Funding for these surveys was obtained from the following government agencies: - Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA), - Department of Environment and Resource Management (DERM), - Australian Marine Mammal Centre (AMMC), - Torres Strait Regional Authority (TSRA), - Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA), - Marine and Tropical Sciences Research Facility (MTSRF), - National Environmental Research Program (NERP). Data is stored as ARC/INFO raster grid files * Projection - Latitude/Longitude * Datum - GDA94 * Scale - 2km square grid cells.
Created: 2011-12-08
Data time period: 2005 to 2007
text: Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area and Hervey Bay; East-Coastal Queensland.
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- Local : researchdata.jcu.edu.au//published/d99094bf972a76839349acdaa6deab92
- Local : jcu.edu.au/tdh/collection/b660da0d-5075-472f-97eb-ba75e6914880
- Local : 67c6a7e99b67c8d18295cf0c3b260036
