Marine Monitoring of Australia's Indigenous Sea Country using Remote Technologies.

Abstract

Joint development of marine monitoring SOPs by AIMS and Indigenous Marine Ranger groups is intentionally focused on new technological advances to provide enhanced and rapid resolution of ecological patterns. These monitoring technologies are partly captured through the use of modern off-the shelf data logging instruments for physical and chemical parameters (e.g., temperature, turbidity, salinity, pH, dissolved oxygen) and partly through the use of underwater still and video imagery to quantify ecological patterns in biological communities through time (e.g., fish or benthic monitoring). However, the choice and development of each technology has to meet two additional criteria for inclusion in the manual. Firstly, data produced from the methods must be able to be interrogated at various levels of sophistication to increase utility by the full range of custodians and stakeholders (i.e., for monitoring, research, management). An example might be underwater videos that can be easily and quickly analyzed by local ranger groups to derive up-to-date estimates of the stock health for a handful of fish species that are culturally important; but the entire fish assemblage and surrounding habitat could also be quantified by a team of scientists as part of a more detailed regional or global scientific program. Secondly, because scientific monitoring is fundamentally aimed at quantifying changes through time, SOPs must provide a permanent, standardized and unbiased historical record that can be revisited at any time to ensure data quality and integrity. Here we concentrate on two ecological marine monitoring SOPs that meet these criteria to illustrate the process of how we draw on traditional knowledge and scientific monitoring methodologies to provide a powerful and effective platform for adaptively managing Australia’s marine environment: 1) Baited Remote Underwater Video Stations (BRUVS) for the quantification of fish abundance and diversity; and 2) DropCam to map and survey the living and non-living components of the seafloor.