Catalysing research and adoption on the Great Barrier Reef

The resilience of the Great Barrier Reef to a changing climate is predicted to vary greatly across the 344,400 km2 and 2,900 individual reefs that make up the world heritage site. This variability presents significant... [ view full abstract ]

The resilience of the Great Barrier Reef to a changing climate is predicted to vary greatly across the 344,400 km2 and 2,900 individual reefs that make up the world heritage site. This variability presents significant challenges for managing the Reef into the future. Effective conservation planning for the Reef will require indicators and tools that can identify resilient reefs and monitor and report on shifts in reef resilience over time.
The Great Barrier Reef Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation with strong links to Australian business, philanthropy, government, and coral reef research and management agencies. To address the challenge of managing the Great Barrier Reef, the Foundation leverages the expertise of its diverse network to catalyse research, develop frameworks, fund projects and facilitate adoption to address a research vision of ‘a resilient Reef’.
New and innovative monitoring methods are being applied, including state-of-the-art techniques like bioinformatics, metabolomics, autonomous vehicles, image recognition software, and mass spectrometry. As a whole, the science of resilience has increasingly become the focus for measuring and managing reef health.
The Foundation funds research that underpins the development of a range of adaptation options to address the ever increasing effects of warming waters, more acidic oceans and organisms that are struggling to adapt. Finally, and most importantly, the research aims to equip reef managers, users and policy-makers with decision-making tools that may help determine where, when and how to deploy these options.