Reef Rescue Marine Monitoring Program: Inshore seagrass, annual report for the sampling period 1st July 2010 – 31st May 2011

A key component of Reef Rescue is the implementation of a long-term water quality and ecosystem monitoring program in the Great Barrier Reef lagoon. Fisheries Queensland and James Cook University were contracted to conduct the intertidal seagrass monitoring component and produce this report, which examines the status and trend of Reef intertidal seagrass (detect long-term trends in seagrass abundance, community structure, distribution, reproductive health, and nutrient status from representative inshore seagrass meadows) and identifies response of seagrass to environmental drivers of change

Reef Rescue Marine Monitoring Program: Inshore seagrass, annual report for the sampling period 1st June 2012 - 31st May 2013

A key component of Reef Rescue is the implementation of a long-term water quality and ecosystem monitoring program in the Great Barrier Reef lagoon. James Cook University were contracted to conduct the intertidal seagrass monitoring component and produce this report, which examines the status and trend of Reef intertidal seagrass (detect long-term trends in seagrass abundance, community structure, distribution, reproductive health, and nutrient status from representative inshore seagrass meadows) and identifies response of seagrass to environmental drivers of change

Reef Rescue Marine Monitoring Program: Inshore seagrass, annual report for the sampling period 1st July 2011 – 31st May 2012

Seagrass monitoring results for 2011-12 from the Marine Monitoring Program, undertaken in the Great Barrier Reef lagoon to assess the long-term effectiveness of the Australian and Queensland Government’s Reef Water Quality Protection Plan (Reef Plan) and the Australian Government’s Reef Rescue initiative

Personalised trails and learner profiling within e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on personalisation and personalised trails. We begin by introducing and defining the concepts of personalisation and personalised trails. Personalisation requires that a user profile be stored, and so we assess currently available standard profile schemas and discuss the requirements for a profile to support personalised learning. We then review techniques for providing personalisation and some systems that implement these techniques, and discuss some of the issues around evaluating personalisation systems. We look especially at the use of learning and cognitive styles to support personalised learning, and also consider personalisation in the field of mobile learning, which has a slightly different take on the subject, and in commercially available systems, where personalisation support is found to currently be only at quite a low level. We conclude with a summary of the lessons to be learned from our review of personalisation and personalised trails

Testing the sediment-trapping paradigm of seagrass: Do seagrasses influence nutrient status and sediment structure in tropical intertidal environments?

Seagrass meadows are considered important for sediment trapping and sediment stabilisation. Deposition of fine sediments and associated adsorbed nutrients is considered an important part of the chemical and biological processes attributed to seagrass communities. This paradigm was based on work in temperate regions on Zostera marina and in tropical regions on Thalassia testudinum, two species that maintain relatively high biomass, stable meadows. The current study investigates this concept for three species of intertidal tropical seagrass meadows in northeastern Australia. Sediment structure and nutrient status did not differ between vegetated and unvegated habitats in intertidal areas within the central region of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area. The 'trapping' functions that have been attributed to seagrasses need to be re-assessed for a variety of locations and species before they can be accepted as dogma. In tropical Australia, intertidal meadows are predominantly ephemeral and comprised of structurally small species of low biomass. Consequently, sediment trapping within these meadows is largely insignificant

Marine Monitoring Program: Inshore seagrass, annual report for the sampling period 1st June 2013 - 31st May 2014

A key component of Reef Plan is the implementation of a long-term water quality and ecosystem monitoring program in the Great Barrier Reef lagoon. James Cook University were contracted to conduct the intertidal seagrass monitoring component and produce this report, which examines the status and trend of Reef intertidal seagrass (detect long-term trends in seagrass abundance, community structure, distribution, reproductive health, and nutrient status from representative inshore seagrass meadows) and identifies response of seagrass to environmental drivers of change

Collaborative trails in e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on collaboration within groups of learners, and hence collaborative trails. We begin by reviewing the theoretical background to collaborative learning and looking at the kinds of support that computers can give to groups of learners working collaboratively, and then look more deeply at some of the issues in designing environments to support collaborative learning trails and at tools and techniques, including collaborative filtering, that can be used for analysing collaborative trails. We then review the state-of-the-art in supporting collaborative learning in three different areas – experimental academic systems, systems using mobile technology (which are also generally academic), and commercially available systems. The final part of the deliverable presents three scenarios that show where technology that supports groups working collaboratively and producing collaborative trails may be heading in the near future

Chapter 19: Vulnerability of coastal and estuarine habitats in the Great Barrier Reef to climate change

This chapter attempts to address the vulnerability of the CEM in the Great Barrier Reef region to global climate change. It does not consider individual habitats (eg reefs or seagrasses) but goes beyond the individual species and habitat assessments, to consider impacts on the whole coastal marine community complex, and the ecological processes that support its functioning.This is Chapter 19 of Climate change and the Great Barrier Reef: a vulnerability assessment. The entire book can be found at http://hdl.handle.net/11017/13

Seagrass habitats of northeast Australia: models of key processes and controls

An extensive and diverse assemblage of seagrass habitats exists along the tropical and subtropical coastline of north east Australia and the associated Great Barrier Reef. In their natural state, these habitats are characterised by very low nutrient concentrations and are primarily nitrogen limited. Summer rainfall and tropical storms/cyclones lead to large flows of sediment-laden fresh water. Macro grazers, dugongs (Dugong dugon) and green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) are an important feature in structuring tropical Australian seagrass communities. In general, all seagrass habitats in north east Australia are influenced by high disturbance and are both spatially and temporally variable. This paper classifies the diversity into four habitat types and proposes the main limiting factor for each habitat. The major processes that categorise each habitat are described and significant threats or gaps in understanding are identified. Four broad categories of seagrass habitat are defined as 'River estuaries', 'Coastal', 'Deep water' and 'Reef', and the dominant controlling factors are terrigenous runoff, physical disturbance, low light and low nutrients, respectively. Generic concepts of seagrass ecology and habitat function have often been found inappropriate to the diverse range of seagrass habitats in north east Australian waters. The classification and models developed here explain differences in habitats by identifying ecological functions and potential response to impacts in each habitat. This understanding will help to better focus seagrass management and research in tropical habitats