You never, never know - if you never, never… integrate your monitoring and research needs

Darwin Harbour has long been recognised and continues to be one of the least-disturbed working harbours in Australia and across the Asia Pacific Region. This reflects both good management to date, and the low level of... [ view full abstract ]

Darwin Harbour has long been recognised and continues to be one of the least-disturbed working harbours in Australia and across the Asia Pacific Region. This reflects both good management to date, and the low level of pressures on a harbour-wide perspective. These pressures are expected to increase in the future. An integrated monitoring and research program is being developed between industry, government agencies, and researchers to provide monitoring and other information for the management of Darwin Harbour to ensure the continued health of Darwin Harbour‘s ecosystem. The pressures on the Darwin Harbour environment are multiple, with no single dominant pressure, and a wide range of environments and biota potentially affected. Moreover, monitoring needs to address incremental, slow and spatially diverse impacts, and provide early detection of environmental degradation. Prevention, rather than restoration, will be applied as an overarching approach owing to the relatively healthy current condition of the Harbour. A Pressure-Stressor-(ecological) Response framework will underpin the monitoring program to link health to pressures, because it is the pressures which can in be modified by management actions. Research efforts will be directed to improving the scientific credibility of monitoring and to improve our understanding of the harbour’s ecosystem in order to better predict and prevent unacceptable impacts. The implementation of an integrated monitoring and research program will be challenging, resource considerations aside, but to never, never implement the program is not an option to maintain the relatively health current state of the Darwin Harbour.