Water quality and biological data was collected from four tide-dominated river estuaries indicative of catchments with varying levels of human impacts to: 1) assess draft indicator levels for water quality, and 2) investigate biological indicators of estuarine health in NW Tasmania. The data represented by this record was collected in the Montagu River.

This dataset relates to deployments of pelagic stereo-BRUVS conducted by the University of Western Australia within and to the west of the Bremer Marine Park in February/March 2017. The survey was undertaken to provide a baseline assessment of the pelagic assemblages occurring in the region as part of the NESP Marine Biodiversity Hub Emerging Priorities Project #EP2 (https://www.nespmarine.edu.au/project/ep2-surveying-marine-life-canyons-bremer-bay). A total of 791 individuals from 13 taxa were identified.

The Indonesian Throughflow (ITF) is connects the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean in the tropics. The ITF plays an essential role in ocean circulation and regional climate: it hosts strong mixing that can change water-mass properties, influences the sea surface temperature in both oceans and affects the global ocean volume and heat transports. The ITF transports water properties across Indonesian Seas characterized by complex topography with most of the water entering through two main inflow straits, Makassar and Lifamatola straits, and exiting into the Indian Ocean through three main outflow straits, Ombai, Lombok and Timor straits. The ITF shows variabilities on different time scales, including decadal, interannual, seasonal and intra-seasonal. The ITF variability on intra-seasonal time scales is driven by remotely generated Kelvin and Rossby waves that propagate into the Indonesian Seas from the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean. This project focuses on the variability driven by Kelvin waves that propagate into Indonesian seas through three main outflow straits (Ombai, Lombok and Timor). We use a global ocean model and a high-resolution regional ITF model to characterize these variabilities at different depths and in different straits. We also use the mooring observations from the INSTANT program to validate the ocean models.

Recordings of ship noise were analysed to build a catalogue of ship noise signatures in Australian waters, including source spectra and source levels. The data described by this record is derived from an initial set of five deployments by the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) acoustic observatories.

The survey comprises two streams of data, including (1) the availability of different attachment sites and (2) the algal composition of abalone attachment sites ('homesites'). The survey was conducted at three sites at each of three regions on the east coast of Tasmania.

Invasive mammal eradications are widely used for managing island ecosystems. However, tracking the outcomes of such large-scale, whole ecosystem projects is challenging and costly, and monitoring all components of an ecosystem is near impossible. Instead, indicators of ecosystem change may provide more practical and integrated measures of ecosystem response to eradications. As high-order marine predators, seabirds subsidise island ecosystems with nutrients isotopically enriched in nitrogen. Invasive mammals have caused a global decline of seabirds on islands, reducing this nutrient subsidisation. Following eradications, nitrogen stable isotope analysis may provide a useful and resource-efficient indicator of ecosystem functional change on eradicated islands. However, isotope ratios are affected by a myriad of factors, with potential sources of variation being introduced by spatial and temporal variation in sampling, and within and between different taxa and ecosystem components. To correctly attribute isotopic change to post-eradication ecosystem function change, these confounding variables need to be understood. To address this need, we analysed stable isotopes of nitrogen in soil, plant, spider, and seabird guano samples collected at different distances from seabird colonies and at different stages of the short-tailed shearwater breeding cycle on six island sites around south-eastern Tasmania, Australia. Across these cool, temperate islands we detected no temporal variability in δ15N throughout the breeding season. However, there was notable spatial variability in δ15N values. The effects of seabird-derived nutrient subsidisation were highly localised with high δ15N values found inside seabird colonies and then rapidly decreasing from the colony boundary. Higher δ15N values also occurred in areas of higher burrow density within a colony. Variability in δ15N values also existed both within and between ecosystem components. Our results highlight the importance of context dependency when using ecological indicators and have important implications for the design, implementation and interpretation of studies employing stable isotopes as indicators for ecosystem change. We provide recommendations for designing future stable isotope studies on seabird islands.