This record provides an overview of the NESP Marine and Coastal Hub project "Synthesis of environmental values to support the review of Australian Marine Park management plans". For specific data outputs from this project, please see child records associated with this metadata.

--------------------

Parks Australia (Australian Government) manage 60 Australian Marine Parks (AMPs) around the country, covering an area of 3.8 million square kilometres, or 43% of all Australian waters.

The approach to managing AMPs is set out in eight Management Plans, one for each of the five marine park networks (North, North-west, South-west, South-east and Temperate East) and one each for the Coral Sea Marine Park, Christmas Island Marine Park and Cocos (Keeling) Islands Marine Park. A statutory review of Management Plans for the North, North-west, South-west, Temperate-East networks and the Coral Sea Marine Park is scheduled for 2028.

This project will support the statutory review of AMP Management Plans by synthesising relevant findings from NESP MaC Hub projects and other work contracted by Parks Australia from 2017 onwards, and integrating these findings into Parks Australia’s processes in 2027. Data will be consolidated at the Park-level to support Network-level assessments, and will include both science outputs and summaries of natural and socio-economic values. This process will leverage existing national marine data platforms to catalogue the available data and generate a synthesis report for each of the Networks subject to the pending statutory review.

The project will also review data summaries, workflows and reporting tools used to develop the synthesis reports and provide recommendations on better integrating this infrastructure to support AMP and national environmental impact and assessment reporting.

Outputs

• Catalogue of available data for each reviewed Network (North, North-west, South-west, Temperate East) and the Coral Sea AMP [data inventory]

• Synthesis report [written] for each region that will include:

- a summary of science activity and outputs since 2017

- summaries of the state and trend of Natural Values and Pressures since 2017, aggregated by Ecosystem Component, Ecosystem Depth Zone, AMP, and AMP Zone type (where possible)

• Final technical report (including recommendations to support AMP management and reporting) [written]