Monitoring priorities and indicators for Australian Marine Parks in the southeast marine region.

The SS2 and D7 projects were instigated by the National Environmental Science Program (NESP) Marine Biodiversity Hub (“the hub”) to support Parks Australia with the design and implementation of the MERI framework. The two projects focus predominantly on the framework’s prerequisites (SS2 project) and the processes that occur at each step of the framework (D7 project). Each of the subsequent sections in this report are based on these prerequisites and steps in the framework.The primary objective of the SS2 project is to provide a spatial explicit analysis of the relative risks posed to marine conservation values, as defined by the MERI framework’s natural values hierarchy, by pressures that operate within Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone and state/territory waters. In completing this objective the project has drawn upon the outcomes of many preceding hub projects, most notably: (i) the geo-location of pressures in projects C1, C5, E2, E4 and D6; (ii) the collation of spatial products that identify the benthic habitats of the Australian shelf, coordinated by project D3; and, (iii) the on-going baseline surveys conducted by the hub and its predecessors.The objectives of the D7 project are to provide the necessary scientific support and advice to complete the monitoring prioritisation. This includes support to develop a new model to identify continental shelf reefs, elucidate and evaluate the core management questions, develop and implement a process to identify and describe Key Natural Values, provide input into the prioritisation of ecosystems for monitoring, and the development of draft conceptual models for the ecosystems in the southeast marine region.The pressure layers collated by the hub are national in their geographic extent, covering all of Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone and state/territory waters. The SS2 and D7 projects, however, are geographically focused on the southeast marine region. This region serves as a pilot region within which the (new) processes developed within the two projects, in order to complete the prerequisites and MERI framework steps, can be tried, tested and where necessary amended, before being applied nationally.