Project 2. Surrogates

Contact Brendon Brooke

A comprehensive assessment of biodiversity for the entire Australian marine jurisdiction is unattainable with current resources and technology. The main challenge faced by researchers and conservation managers, therefore, is to predict biodiversity from the most useful surrogates. The aim of this project is to provide an improved understanding of the utility of marine biophysical variables as surrogates for benthic habitats and patterns of marine biodiversity.

Project Tasks

There are 3 tasks that cover identifying and acquiring data, assessment and further development of physical surrogates and the development of disturbance surrogates for the shelf and slope.

Compilation and Assessment of Physical and Biological Datasets
Identifies the range of useful biophysical datasets available for Hub research, including a description of their quality and location, and assessment of their potential utility as surrogates for marine habitats and biodiversity, supported with a literature review.

Further Development of Physical Surrogates.
Improves our understanding of the degree and form of relationships between physical variables and benthic marine biota, and identifies the best analysis methods to relate these variables to biological data.

Development of a Surrogates to Represent Influence of (Physical) Benthic Disturbance on Patterns of Marine Biodiversity.
Identifies the range of physical disturbance regimes occurring on the Australian continental shelf and quantifies their geographic extents. (2) Develops disturbance indexes suitable for surrogacy applications that represent the energy level, delivery rate and peak-load of seabed stress. (3) Maps at a regional scale (where existing data sets permit) the areas on the shelf slope that are likely to be disturbed by seabed failure and associated down-slope mass movement and gravity currents. (4) Provides a regional ranking of the slope based on susceptibility.

Identified PhD Projects

• Non-extractive monitoring of biodiversity on temperate Australian deepwater reefs: using advanced vision-processing techniques to develop and test reliable biodiversity metrics.
  Contact Neville Barrett and Alan Williams