This record provides an overview of the NESP Marine and Coastal Hub bridging study - "Support for Parks Australia’s Monitoring, Evaluation, Reporting and Improvement System for Australian Marine Parks". For specific data outputs from this project, please see child records associated with this metadata.

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The system of marine parks that spans Australia’s Commonwealth waters is among the largest in the world. The parks play a major role in conserving marine life, supporting commercial and recreational pursuits, and help to protect cultural values significant to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Parks Australia has developed management plans for the five regional Australian Marine Park (AMP) networks (North, North-west, South-west, South-east and Temperate East) and the Coral Sea Marine Park. Under each management plan, a science plan sets monitoring and research priorities to guide the collection of information to evaluate management effectiveness, and identify opportunities for improvement. This prioritisation is vital given the low levels of knowledge for most of the AMPs, the technical challenges and high cost of implementing science in vast and remote areas, the finite resources available for park management, and the complexity of the decision-making process.

This project provided Parks Australia with scientific and technical information and advice necessary to establish monitoring priorities for natural values and pressures for AMP networks and the Coral Sea Marine Park (CSMP). Taken together with previous work completed under the Marine Biodiversity Hub (projects SS2 and D7), this completes a full national priority list for monitoring in AMPs. The combined research provides a nationally accepted common language to describe natural values and pressures in a science-based approach to combining this information to determine national priorities. The Monitoring, Evaluation, Reporting and Improvement (MERI) system is the first national process of its type globally and is a significant step towards adaptive, integrated and place-based management.

Activities undertaken by this project collated and analysed environmental and human use-data for each of the AMP networks and the CSMP. The key data outputs and Final Project Report identify the monitoring priorities in each Network and the CSMP, and help to identify key knowledge gaps to help inform future research priorities. These steps can be repeated through time alongside improvements in the evidence base and our understanding of how ecosystems respond to multi-sectoral activities to achieve continual improvement in management actions and environmental outcomes,

Outputs

• Digital map layers per AMP network of:

(1) Ecosystems

(2) Pressures & Activities

(3) Cumulative Impacts

• Final Technical Report containing maps of Key Natural Values, and of spatial Monitoring Priorities, including a short summary of recommendations for policy makers of key findings [written]