Alana and Melanie attended an Estuarine & Marine Classification workshop for coastal Queensland this week (download the factsheet here for more information). The workshop, held in Townsville and facilitated by Queensland Wetlands Program, was part of a whole series which aims at developing a generic classification for estuarine and marine habitats in coastal Queensland, Australia.
The proposed classification system will provide a framework and principles to enable a future mapping for estuarine and marine environments. The future classification will build on the existing Interim Australian National Aquatic Ecosystem Classification Scheme (ANAE).
The Townsville workshop was an interesting exercise between a wide variety of stakeholders including managers, software developers and academic researchers. Discussions were engaging, intellectually challenging and led to a few debates among experts on how to describe best the habitats in a way that will later be useful for management purposes. There will be more workshops to come in the next few months to explicitly identify the different habitat types.
The project is a collaboration between the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF), Department of Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts (DSITIA), Department of National Parks, Recreation, Sport and Racing (NPRSR),, Gladstone Ports Corporation (GPC) and the Department of Environment and Heritage Protection (EHP). Other organisations including Queensland universities, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) and some natural resource management (NRM) bodies are also involved.
Email wetlands@ehp.qld.gov.au to find out more about getting involved in this project. If you have data or know of relevant datasets, if you are doing research on a relevant or related project, they would like to hear from you. Please email them if you would like to join the mailing list to find out about future workshops and project outcomes.
