Processed analyte measurements from the Great Barrier Reef's Marine Monitoring Program.

These data accompany a manuscript that examines data from the Great Barrier Reef MMP inshore water quality program (MMP WQ) and assesses the impact that the sampling re-design had on the power to detect trends in six priority water quality analytes, which is a primary objective of the MMP WQ. The manuscript details are Luke R. Lloyd-Jones, Petra M. Kuhnert, Emma Lawrence, Stephen E. Lewis, Jane Waterhouse, Renee K. Gruber and Frederieke J. Kroon. Sampling re-design increases power to detect change in the Great Barrier Reef’s inshore water quality. 2022. The dataset in file GBR-MMPDataset-processed-power.csv file contains data from the MMP WQ monitoring program. The current MMP WQ monitors the inshore waters of the GBR Marine Park across five of the six Natural Resource Management (NRM) regions: Cape York, Wet Tropics, Burdekin, Mackay-Whitsunday, and Fitzroy. In our study, we consider monitoring data collected across four study areas within three of these NRM regions, namely the Russell-Mulgrave and Tully study areas (within the Wet Tropics NRM region), the Burdekin study area (i.e., the Burdekin NRM region), and the Mackay-Whitsunday study area (i.e., the Mackay-Whitsunday NRM region). The data uses inshore water quality data obtained from ambient monitoring using grab samples at fixed locations across these four study areas from 2005 to 2019. The data used are combined from across two research organisations that monitor different spatiotemporal components of the GBR. The institutions include the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) and James Cook University (JCU). The MMP WQ conducts ambient water quality monitoring, including grab sampling during non-event periods (i.e., outside river flooding events), to collect a suite of physical, chemical, and biological water quality analytes at each sampling location. These data are for six water quality analytes, namely total suspended solids (TSS), Secchi disc depth (Secchi), Chlorophyll a (Chl-a), particulate nitrogen (PN), particulate phosphorus (PP), and nitrate/nitrite (NOx). These six analytes are considered relatively robust indicators that integrate several bio-physical processes in the coastal ocean, and water quality guideline values are available for all six of these analytes.