Pitcher et al., 2007:

"The Great Barrier Reef is a unique World Heritage Area of national and international significance. As a multiple use Marine Park, activities such as fishing and tourism occur along with conservation goals. Managers need information on habitats and biodiversity distribution and risks to ensure these activities are conducted sustainably. However, while the coral reefs have been relatively well studied, less was known about the deeper seabed in the region. From 2003 to 2006, the Great Barrier Reef Seabed Biodiversity Project has mapped habitats and their associated biodiversity across the length and breadth of the 210,000 km² shelf in the Marine Park to provide information that will help managers with conservation planning and to assess whether fisheries are ecologically sustainable, as required by environmental protection legislation (e.g. EPBC Act 1999).

Holistic information on the biodiversity of the seabed was acquired by visiting almost 1400 sites, representing a full range of known environments, during 10 month-long voyages on two vessels and deploying several types of devices such as: towed video and digital cameras, baited remote underwater video stations (BRUVS), a digital echo-sounder, an epibenthic sled and a research trawl to collect samples for more detailed data about plants, invertebrates and fishes on the seabed. Data were collected and processed from >600 km of towed video and almost 100,000 photos, 1150 BRUVS videos, ~140 GB of digital echograms, and from sorting and identification of ~14,000 benthic samples, ~4000 seabed fish samples, and ~1200 sediment samples.

The project has analysed this information and produced all of the outputs as originally proposed; these included:

• Images and videos of seabed habitat types and fishes, including more than 150 substratum and biological habitat component types; and >300 fishes, sharks, rays and sea snakes attracted to BRUVS.
• An inventory of more than 5300 species of benthos, by-catch and fishes, with catalogued museum voucher specimens, many of which were new species, and a database of more than 140,000 records of species distribution and abundance on the seabed.
• Identification of the key environmental variables likely to be important in structuring seabed distributions, including: sediment grain size and carbonate composition, benthic irradiance, current stress, bathymetry, bottom water physical attributes, nutrients and turbidity — and predictive models of bio-physical relationships between seabed species, their assemblages and the physical environment.
•  Maps of the distribution and abundance of ~850 seabed species throughout the Great Barrier Reef shelf region.
•  Estimates of the likely extent of past effects of trawling on benthos and by-catch over the entire shelf of the Great Barrier Reef region, which indicated that trawl effort had a significant effect on the biomass of 6.5% of 850 species mapped; with negative biomass change of -1% to -36% for 4.5% of these species and positive biomass change of +1% to +96% for 2% of these species.Estimates of exposure to trawl effort showed that about 70% of the 850 species mapped had low or very low exposure, and at the other extreme, about 33 species had high to very high exposure to trawl effort — of these species, after taking relative catch rates into account, five had high estimates of proportion caught annually and 28 were intermediate. The remainder (>800 species) had low or very low estimates of proportion caught annually.
•  Indicators based on qualitative recovery ranks showed that about 15 species stood out as being at higher relative risk with respect to trawling. An additional, quantitative absolute sustainability indicator showed that three species (Fistularia petimba, Brachirus muelleri, Trixiphichthys weberi) exceeded a limit reference point (analogous to maximum sustainable yield, MSY), one species (Pomadasys maculatus) exceeded a first conservative reference point (=0.8×MSY) and two others (Psettodes erumei, Sillago burrus) exceeded a second conservative reference point (=0.6×MSY) — another 10 species were also listed due to uncertainty in parameters, though they were below the sustainability reference points.
• Evaluations of the environmental performance of several recent management interventions showed that generalised depletion trends up until the late 1990s have all been arrested and reversed — the 2001 buyback of fishing licences and subsequent penalties made the biggest positive contributions with the 2004 rezoning of the Marine Park making a small positive contribution for some species." 

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Citation and/or URL

Pitcher, C.R., Doherty, P., Arnold, P., Hooper, J., Gribble, N., Bartlett, C., Browne, M., Campbell, N., Cannard, T., Cappo, M., Carini, G., Chalmeres, S., Cheers, S., Chetwynd, D., Colegax, A., Coles, R., Cook, S., Davie, P., De'ath, G., Devereux, D., Done, B., Donovan, T., Ehrke, B., Ellis, N., Ericson, G., Fellegara, I., Forcey, K., Furey, M., Gledhill, D., Good, N., Gordon, S., Haywood, M., Hendricks, M., Jacobsen, I., Johnson, J., Jones, M., Kinninmoth, S., Kistle, S., Last, P., Leite, A., Amrks, S., McLeod, I., Oczkowicz, S., Robinson, M., Rose, C., Seabright, D., Sheils, J., Sherlock, M., Skelton, P., Smith, D., Smith, G., Speare, P., Stowar, M., Strickland, C., Van der Geest, C., Venables, W., Walsh, C., Wassenberg, T.J., Welna, A. & Yearsley, G. 2007, Seabed biodiversity on the continental shelf of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area: CRC Reef Research Task final report, CSIRO Marine Marine and Atmospheric Research CRC REEF Task Number: C1.1.2; FRDC Project Number: 2003/021; NOO Contract Number: 2004/015, Cleveland, Qld.

Spatial Coverage

Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area 

Temporal Coverage

Data from QDPI 1994 to 1999; Seabed Biodiversity Project data collected 2003 to 2006 

Update Frequency

 Not applicable 

Other Information

 None