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A Preliminary Report Candidate bioindicator measures to monitor exposure to changing water quality on the Great Barrier Reef INTERIM REPORT Katharina Fabricius1, Sven Uthicke1, Tim Cooper1,2, Craig Humphrey1, Glenn De’ath1 and Jane Mellors3 1 Australian Institute of Marine Science, Townsville 2 James Cook University, Townsville 3 Queensland Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries, Cairns Catchment to Reef Joint Research Programme of the CRC Reef Research Centre and Rainforest CRC Supported by the Australian Government’s Marine and Tropical Sciences Research Facility © Australian Institute of Marine Science and Catchment to Reef Joint Research Programme of the CRC Reef Research Centre and Rainforest CRC. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Candidate bioindicator measures to monitor exposure to changing water quality on the Great Barrier Reef. Bibliography. ISBN 9781921359026 (pdf). 1. Water quality management – Queensland – Great Barrier Reef Region. 2. Watershed management – Queensland – Great Barrier Reef Region. 3. Water quality – Queensland – Great Barrier Reef Region. 4. Environmental protection – Queensland – Great Barrier Reef Region. 5. Great Barrier Reef Region (Qld.) – Environmental aspects. I. Fabricius, Katharina. II. Reef and Rainforest Research Centre. 628.1109443 This report should be cited as: Fabricius, K., Uthicke, S., Cooper, T., Humphrey, C., De’ath, G. and Mellors, J. (2007) Candidate bioindicator measures to monitor exposure to changing water quality on the Great Barrier Reef. Final Report to the Catchment to Reef Joint Research Programme. Marine and Tropical Sciences Research Facility Research Report Series. Reef and Rainforest Research Centre Limited, Cairns (253 pp.). Published by the Reef and Rainforest Research Centre Limited for the Catchment to Reef Joint Research Programme and the Australian Government’s Marine and Tropical Sciences Research Facility. The CRC Reef Research Centre and Rainforest CRC were awarded a joint Supplementary Grant from the Australian Cooperative Research Centres (CRC) Programme for three years to develop new protocols and tools to identify and mitigate water quality problems and to assess the health of aquatic ecosystems in the Wet Tropics and Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Areas. The Catchment to Reef Steering Committee was established to manage the Catchment to Reef project and comprised the CEOs of both CRCs and management level representatives from stakeholder organisations including Griffith University, James Cook University, Australian Institute of Marine Science, Wet Tropics Management Authority, Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and the Natural Resource Management Board for the Wet Tropics (FNQ NRM Ltd). The Marine and Tropical Sciences Research Facility (MTSRF) is part of the Australian Government’s Commonwealth Environment Research Facilities programme. The MTSRF is represented in North Queensland by the Reef and Rainforest Research Centre Limited (RRRC). The aim of the MTSRF is to ensure the health of North Queensland’s public environmental assets – particularly the Great Barrier Reef and its catchments, tropical rainforests including the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area, and the Torres Strait – through the generation and transfer of world class research and knowledge sharing. This publication is copyright. The Copyright Act 1968 permits fair dealing for study, research, information or educational purposes subject to inclusion of a sufficient acknowledgement of the source. The Biodiversity Monitoring Toolkit proformas are available for copying and use by community groups and revegetation practitioners, provided sufficient acknowledgement is given. The views and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Australian Government or the Minister for the Environment and Water Resources. While reasonable efforts have been made to ensure that the contents of this publication are factually correct, the Commonwealth does not accept responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the contents, and shall not be liable for any loss or damage that may be occasioned directly or indirectly through the use of, or reliance on, the contents of this publication. This report has been produced for the sole use of the party who requested it. The application or use of this report and of any data or information (including results of experiments, conclusions, and recommendations) contained within it shall be at the sole risk and responsibility of that party. This report is available for download from the Reef and Rainforest Research Centre website. Visit http://www.rrrc.org.au/publications. Published in August 2007. Candidate bioindicator measures to monitor exposure of changing water quality on the Great Barrier Reef Preface This Interim Technical Report summarises research results aimed at identifying sensitive and cost-effective indicators to monitor changes in biota in the inshore Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in response to changing water quality from altered catchments. Through the Great Barrier Reef Water Quality Protection Plan, the National Action Plan (NAP) for Salinity and Water Quality and National Heritage Trust (NHT2), the Commonwealth and Queensland Governments proposed to assist landholders in the Great Barrier Reef catchment to reduce terrestrial runoff of sediment and nutrients to the reef. The main aim of the ‘Reef Plan’ is to ‘halt or reverse the decline in water quality entering the GBR’ by 2013. As rivers are the most important sources of new nutrients and sediments entering the lagoon, a reduction of river loads should, in the long term, prevent further deterioration of the water quality within the GBR lagoon. The importance of the actions proposed through the ‘Reef Plan’ have recently been further emphasised by new models that show that dissolved nutrients discharged from the Burdekin river mouth may be retained in the GBR lagoon by physical processes alone for up one year. Biological uptake could further slow down dissipation, resulting in exposure times of reef organisms to land-sourced materials that are ecologically relevant. Developing the capacity to reliably monitor the status in nearshore marine ecosystems in response to changing water quality is an essential part of the Reef Plan. This Report presents preliminary results of research aimed at identifying the most suitable biophysical indicators to identify and track such changes. It was conducted as a Task of the ‘Catchment to Reef Program’ (January 2004 - June 2006), a supplementary program to the Cooperative Research Centre for the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area (CRC Reef) and the Rainforest CRC. This Interim Report also builds on and incorporates elements of previous work carried out through the CRC Reef Task ‘Terrestrial Runoff: Inputs and Impacts (July 2000 – June 2006), and ongoing research activities at AIMS, which produced a review of a number of related studies assessing the effects of terrestrial runoff on individual groups of ecosystem properties (e.g. Fabricius and De'ath 2004; Brodie et al. 2005; Harrington et al. 2005; Negri et al. 2005; Wolanski et al. 2005; DeVantier et al. 2006; Fabricius 2006; Weber et al. 2006). i Fabricius et al. Contents Preface...................................................................................................................................... i List of Figures.......................................................................................................................... iv List of Tables...........................................................................................................................vii Acronyms Used In This Report ............................................................................................... ix Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................. ix Executive Summary ................................................................................................................. x Chapter 1: Introduction.........................................................................................................1 1.1 Water quality and coral reefs .................................................................................1 1.2 Bioindicators for changing water quality ................................................................3 1.3 About this study .....................................................................................................4 Appendix 1.1...................................................................................................................6 1.4 References..........................................................................................................14 Chapter 2: Gradients in water column nutrients, sediments, irradiance and coral reef development in the Whitsunday region, central Great Barrier Reef ..............17 Abstract.........................................................................................................................17 2.1 Introduction..........................................................................................................17 2.2 Materials and methods ........................................................................................20 2.3 Results.................................................................................................................23 2.4 Discussion...........................................................................................................33
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