The role of the voyage in CSIRO's Wealth from Oceans Flagship

The Flagship's overall goal is to position Australia as an international benchmark in the delivery of economic, social and environmental wealth based on leadership in understanding ocean systems and processes.

The goal of Theme 4 within the Flagship is to understand how to achieve a balance between human use and impact on marine ecosystems - supporting development of marine industries while sustaining healthy marine ecosystems. In operational terms, projects will establish and implement robust tools to assist managers of marine resources in decision making. A core component of such tools is their ability to integrate information for multiple issues and locations across the multiple users of marine ecosystems - that include shipping, oil and gas, aspects of tourism and recreation, coastal development of human settlements, fishing and aquaculture.

Integrated modeling tools provide a national approach to managing regional development and growth. They can maintain focus on urgent national issues, identify Australia's most sensitive and valuable marine regions, and provide a process to test and refine management strategies. These steps are reflected in the Theme 4 Streams and their core projects:

The voyage will contribute to the Flagship goals in each Stream by:

Voyage outputs

These voyages will provide the first large-scale and systematic collections of benthic invertebrates and data on benthic habitats from the deep ocean off southwest and west Australia, and will enable comparison to existing information at regional and international scales. Results will immediately inform marine resource management, will be used to develop and test scientific hypotheses on the structure and maintenance of biodiversity and its susceptibility to environmental stress, and continue strategic development of tools and techniques for deep seabed mapping.

Habitat mapping and biology

Ecosystem-based, integrated, regional marine planning depends on identifying planning units that are natural regions and can be meaningfully defined by lines on maps. These need to be identified and interpreted on a number of spatial scales for different planning and management purposes because marine ecosystems and human activities operate at multiple scales. Relevant scales include those relating to major faunal distributions (provinces and depth zones of the continental shelf and slope (typically 1000s km in size); intermediate-sized features with 'special' biodiversity associations such as submarine canyons and seamounts (typically 100s of km in size); and several finer scales (m to km) at which human use and impacts occur. The broad latitude and depth-stratification of our survey data (inner and outer shelf, upper and mid-slope in three Provinces) will contribute to understanding biological distributions, biogeography and faunal origins at the broadest scales, while sampling targeted at specific features such as the Ningaloo continental slope, Perth Canyon and Albany seamounts will provide the first data at finer scales within priority areas for marine resource managers. Outputs will include high-resolution multibeam acoustic maps (bathymetry, texture, slope and backscatter) 'ground-truthed' with high resolution, georeferenced photography and physical samples of seabed (sediment and rock types). Biological inventories will cover animals living on the seabed (the 'epifauna') collected by sled, and animals living in the surface sediments (the' infauna') collected with a grab and box corer.

Genetic "Barcoding" program

The extensive collection of invertebrate fauna on the second voyage will provide the material to extend the WfO Barcode of Life program from fish to other marine animals. Specimens collected on this survey will be analysed (in conjunction with museum taxonomists) to define the biogeography of selected invertebrate phyla. The genetic structure of species and populations will be used to ask fundamental questions on how biodiversity is structured in Australia's outershelf and slope waters, will be used to develop testable hypotheses on how it is maintained, and thus start to define the scales of spatial management necessary to conserve biodiversity.

Hydrochemistry/phytoplankton data

The survey will provide a valuable in-situ dataset of bio-optical parameters to the WfO Remote Sensing project (Theme 1, Stream 2). The in situ measurements will be used to validate the satellite-based estimates of the same parameters made at a large spatial scale. This will contribute to developing and refining algorithms to deliver accurate satellite estimates of water column properties such as chlorophyll A/ phytoplankton biomass for the waters off Western Australia.

Specific outputs and their delivery into WfO Theme 4 projects include:

Project output or data product	WfO T4 projects
Characterization of deep continental shelf and continental slope benthic ecosystems, including candidate sites for biodiversity conservation such as Ningaloo, the Perth Canyon and Albany Seamounts	2.2, 3.3 + cluster projects
Interpreted maps of seabed habitats (high resolution, multi-scale swath maps with high resolution photographic 'ground-truth' data) that include a network of scientific reference sites	1.3, 2.2, 3.3+ clusters
Genetic samples from key faunal groups (sponges, soft corals, echinoderms) for CO1 gene analysis ("Bar-coding")	1.2
Information on the evolution and biogeography of Australia's deep benthic fauna	2.2

The voyage design, participants and schedule

Sampling design

Latitudinal sampling will be at ~1 degree intervals along the 400 m depth horizon, with cross-depth transects (100 to 1000 m) in the 3 biogeographic provinces. Key features including the Ningaloo continental slope, Perth Canyon and Albany seamounts will be sampled at several locations in depths from 100 to 1500 m depth. Water column samples will be used to describe the phytoplankton distribution in relation to primary water masses. Fluorescence data will be collected to validate ocean colour measurements at the sea surface, and multi-frequency acoustic data will be collected through the water column to describe the ocean's 'deep scattering layers'.

Participants

The project team from CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research (CMAR) will be joined by researchers from Geoscience Australia and several of Australia's museums including Museum Victoria, Western Australian Museum, and Australian Museum Sydney. There will also be input from international taxonomic experts. The Project leaders Drs Alan Williams, Rudy Kloser and Nic Bax are from CMAR in Hobart.

Schedule

Survey 1: Depart Dampier 21 July 2005, Arrive Fremantle 17 August 2005
Survey 2: Depart Fremantle 17 Nov 2005, Arrive Dampier 14 Dec 2005

Sponsors

Wealth from Oceans Flagship; CMAR; National Oceans Office; Marine National Facility

Project details

See the Voyage plan.