Reflecting on a decade of collaborations to improve monitoring, evaluation and reporting on marine ecosystem health in offshore waters

Reporting on the status and trends of marine ecosystem health is an intuitively attractive ambition shared by many marine scientists and if done effectively would provide benefits for Australians; but this is not a trivial... [ view full abstract ]

Reporting on the status and trends of marine ecosystem health is an intuitively attractive ambition shared by many marine scientists and if done effectively would provide benefits for Australians; but this is not a trivial short-term task as there are many interests, skills and resources that need to align to develop it cost-effectively and maintain it over the long term. The Australian Government is seeking to improve monitoring, evaluation and reporting on ecosystem health in the marine environment for its five bioregional planning areas. For almost a decade, policy makers and scientists have collaborated to steadily build capacity to make the improvements. Efforts have been directed to prioritising monitoring interests, indicator identification, capacity to collect data, analysis of existing time series data and linking with existing environmental reporting mechanisms. This presentation will summarise the achievements of these collaborative efforts and demonstrate how they are moving us toward a marine monitoring blueprint to meet the Australian Government’s needs to report on the status and trends of marine ecosystem health in offshore waters. Lessons learnt from this experience will be distilled including: the essential importance of governance in transitioning from research to sustained monitoring; the necessity of agreeing on clear priorities to drive the required national collaboration; and the importance of developing and using national standards for data collection analysis and reporting to empower many data gatherers. The methods of knowledge brokering in identifying champions and maintaining the relevance and sustained effort in the face of changing policy and funding environments will be explained and the next steps for the continuing collaboration will be outlined.